Hobbes' Leviathan (1651): The Social Contract and Sovereign Power

Leviathan, published in London in 1651, is Thomas Hobbes’s masterpiece of political philosophy. Written in exile during the English Civil Wars, it argued that people create a state through a social contract to escape a natural condition of war, and that the resulting sovereign power must be undivided and nearly absolute. It remains one of the founding works of modern political thought.

Background: a philosopher shaped by civil war

Thomas Hobbes was born on 5 April 1588 at Westport, beside Malmesbury in Wiltshire. In a later verse autobiography he joked that his mother gave birth to twins, himself and fear, because of rumours of the Spanish Armada. After Oxford he spent most of his life as tutor and secretary to the Cavendish family, the earls of Devonshire.

Travel in Europe brought him into contact with Galileo and with the circle of Marin Mersenne in Paris, and he became convinced that politics could be studied with the rigour of geometry. His first political treatise, The Elements of Law, circulated in manuscript in 1640 and defended royal power.

As conflict between Charles I and Parliament grew in 1640, Hobbes feared arrest and fled to Paris. There he wrote De Cive (1642) and, during the English Civil War, taught mathematics to the exiled Prince of Wales, the future Charles II. He also wrote one of the sets of objections printed with René Descartes’ Meditations in 1641.

Publication

Leviathan appeared in London in 1651, printed for the bookseller Andrew Crooke, around two years after the execution of Charles I. Its full title was Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill. Hobbes wrote it in English, aiming at a wide audience.

Its famous engraved title page, designed with the French artist Abraham Bosse, shows a giant crowned figure rising over a landscape. His body is made up of hundreds of tiny people, and he holds a sword and a bishop’s crozier, symbols of civil and church power. Above him is a Latin line from the Book of Job: “there is no power on earth to be compared to him”.

The state of nature

The book is divided into four parts: Of Man, Of Commonwealth, Of a Christian Commonwealth, and Of the Kingdom of Darkness. Hobbes begins with human nature, which he explains mechanically through sensation, desire and fear.

People, he argues, are roughly equal in strength and wit, and they compete for scarce goods, fear one another and seek glory. Without a common power to keep them in awe, they live in a condition of war “of every man against every man”. In chapter 13 he describes life there as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”, without industry, trade, knowledge or arts.

The social contract and the sovereign

Reason shows people a way out through “laws of nature”, the first of which is to seek peace. They therefore agree with one another to transfer their right of governing themselves to a single person or assembly. This covenant creates the commonwealth, the “great Leviathan” or “mortal God”.

The sovereign is not a party to the contract and so cannot break it. Hobbes insisted that sovereign power must be undivided, controlling law, war, taxation, censorship and the public teaching of religion. He thought monarchy the best form, but the same logic applied to an assembly. Subjects keep only a few rights, above all the right to defend their own lives.

In chapter 21 and in the closing “Review and Conclusion”, Hobbes argued that obedience lasts as long as the sovereign is able to protect its subjects. Many readers took this as advice to accept the new republican government, which in 1650 was demanding an oath of loyalty known as the Engagement.

Religion and the church

Half of Leviathan deals with religion, a fact often forgotten by modern readers. In the third part Hobbes reads the Bible closely to argue that Scripture itself supports his politics. He claimed that no private person can be sure that someone else’s revelation is genuine, so the sovereign must decide which interpretations of Scripture are taught in public.

Hobbes argued that the only belief necessary for salvation is that Jesus is the Christ, which helped to reduce the grounds for religious war. He also put forward controversial views, such as that the soul is not naturally immortal and that there is no incorporeal substance.

In the fourth part, “Of the Kingdom of Darkness”, he attacked what he saw as the misuse of religion for worldly power. His main targets were the papacy, scholastic philosophy taught in the universities, and any clergy, Catholic or Presbyterian, who claimed authority independent of the state. These pages made him enemies among churchmen of every kind.

Reception and controversy

Leviathan pleased almost no faction. Royalist exiles at the court in Paris were offended by its apparent acceptance of the Commonwealth, and Hobbes returned to England in the winter of 1651–1652, submitting to the Council of State. Clergy of all kinds attacked its materialism and its argument that the sovereign should decide religious doctrine. Bishop John Bramhall accused him of undermining religion, and “Hobbist” became a byword for atheism.

After the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, the king protected his old tutor and granted him a pension. Still, in 1666, after the Great Plague and the Great Fire, a parliamentary committee was instructed to consider Leviathan in connection with a bill against atheism. Hobbes could no longer publish freely on such subjects in England. A Latin version appeared in Amsterdam in 1668.

Hobbes died at Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire on 4 December 1679, aged 91. In 1683 the University of Oxford condemned propositions from Leviathan and De Cive and had the books burned.

Legacy

Leviathan gave political philosophy its central modern questions: why we should obey the state, and what the state owes us in return. Its idea of a social contract made by individuals, rather than authority granted by God or tradition, was taken up and transformed by later thinkers. John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government argued for limited government and a right of resistance, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau developed a democratic version.

Today Hobbes is read as a founder of liberal ideas about individual rights and consent, even though his conclusions were authoritarian. His picture of the state of nature also shapes “realist” theories of international relations, in which states coexist without any common power above them.

Myths and facts

Myth: Hobbes thought people are simply evil. He argued that people are driven by fear, competition and desire for glory, and that the state of nature is miserable because there is no common power, not because human beings are wicked by nature.

Myth: Hobbes defended the divine right of kings. He supported strong monarchy, but he based sovereignty on a human agreement made for self-preservation, not on God’s appointment of a particular dynasty.

Myth: the state of nature was meant as a real historical period. Hobbes treated it mainly as a thought experiment, though he pointed to civil wars and to relations between sovereign states as examples of what it looks like.

Timeline

• 1588, 5 April: Thomas Hobbes is born at Westport, Malmesbury.
• 1640: The Elements of Law circulates; Hobbes flees to Paris.
• 1642: De Cive is published in Paris.
• 1649, 30 January: Charles I is executed and England becomes a republic.
• 1651: Leviathan is published in London.
• 1651–1652, winter: Hobbes returns to England.
• 1666: A parliamentary committee is told to examine Leviathan.
• 1668: A Latin version is published in Amsterdam.
• 1679, 4 December: Hobbes dies at Hardwick Hall.
• 1683: Oxford University orders Leviathan burned.

Why it matters

Leviathan was the first great attempt to build a theory of the state from the needs and fears of individuals. Even readers who reject its case for absolute power still argue within the framework it created, which makes it a cornerstone of political science, law and modern ideas of government by consent.