Work · Hobbes

Leviathan

1651 · Four parts

Why we trade our freedom to an absolute sovereign rather than live in the war of all against all.

Parts

1651

Published

Social contract

The tool it forged

Read itIts ideas and famous passages, in plain English.→

Why leave the state of nature

No common power

Under one sovereign

A war of every man against every man

Peace, kept by a power able to overawe all

No industry, farming, building, or arts

The security in which all of those become possible

Every man his own judge, so no end to the quarrel

One undivided judgment everyone has agreed to obey

Life solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short

Life and limb protected, in exchange for obedience

Hobbes builds the whole book from one comparison. Roughly equal people, with no common power above them, are driven by competition and fear into a war of all against all; the only exit is to hand the sword to a single undivided sovereign and owe it obedience in return for protection. The trade is the argument.

The shape of the argument

Part I — Of Man

From sense and appetite up to the state of nature and the laws of nature: what people are, and why, left alone, they end in war.

Part II — Of Commonwealth

The covenant that ends the war: why authority must be single and undivided, and what powers the sovereign must hold to keep the peace.

Part III — Of a Christian Commonwealth

Religion placed under the civil sovereign, with scripture read to deny any church a rival sword.

Part IV — Of the Kingdom of Darkness

The errors and clerical politics that divide authority and, Hobbes argues, breed exactly the civil war he had lived through.

The cast

Hobbes — writes in exile during the English Civil War, tracing the bloodshed to divided authority

The Leviathan — the "mortal god": one undivided sovereign holding both sword and crozier

The state of nature — the thought experiment that does all the work, men without a common power above them

Locke and Rousseau — the heirs who took up his method and turned it against his conclusion

The famous bits

The state of naturePart I, ch. 13

Strip away the common power and what remains is not freedom but a war of every man against every man.

Nasty, brutish, and shortPart I, ch. 13

The most quoted line in political philosophy is a description of life with no state to keep the peace.

The laws of naturePart I, chs. 14–15

Reason’s own rules for survival, which point toward peace but bind no one until a power can enforce them.

The covenantPart II, ch. 17

Each lays down the right to govern himself, on condition every other does the same, and authorises one sovereign over all.

The Kingdom of DarknessPart IV

Every rival authority that divides the sword and clouds the judgment the sovereign needs his subjects to keep clear.

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