# Leviathan *Published April 1651 by Andrew Crooke, London. ~730 pages in four parts. Author: [[Thomas Hobbes]], in exile in Paris during the English [[American Civil War]]. Full title: **Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil**. The most important work of political philosophy in the English language — the book that invented the modern theory of the state by asking what political authority would look like if you built it from scratch on a foundation of pure self-interest.* *Leviathan* is the book that made sovereignty a philosophical problem rather than a theological one. Before Hobbes, political authority was typically justified by divine right, tradition, or the natural hierarchy of human types (Aristotle's "natural slavery"). Hobbes swept all of this away and asked: if human beings are equal, self-interested, and living without government, **why would they submit to authority at all?** His answer — because the alternative is intolerable — created the social-contract tradition that Locke, Rousseau, Paine, and the American Founders all worked within, even when reaching opposite conclusions. ## The argument ### Part I: Of Man (chapters 1–16) Hobbes begins not with politics but with **human psychology** — a materialist account of sensation, imagination, language, reason, and the passions. His method is unprecedented: build a theory of politics from the ground up, starting with what humans are and what they want. The key claims: **Materialism.** Everything is matter in motion. Thought is the movement of matter in the brain; desire is the movement of matter toward an object; aversion is movement away. There are no immaterial souls, no supernatural faculties, no Forms or essences. This was philosophically explosive in 1651 and earned Hobbes accusations of atheism that followed him for the rest of his life. **Equality.** Human beings are fundamentally equal in their capacities — not in the modern moral sense, but in the competitive sense. Even the weakest can kill the strongest (through stealth, alliances, or weapons). This equality of capability produces equality of hope: everyone believes they can get what they want. And equality of hope produces conflict: when two people want the same thing and can't both have it, they become enemies. **The passions.** Human life is driven by desire — an unending succession of wants, each satisfied only to produce the next. There is no summum bonum (ultimate good) — only the perpetual pursuit of power ("a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death"). This is not malice; it's structural. You need power not because you're evil but because without it you can't secure what you already have. ### The state of nature (chapter 13) The most famous chapter in political philosophy. Hobbes constructs a thought experiment: what would life look like **without** a common power to keep people in awe? His answer: a **war of every man against every man** — not necessarily constant fighting, but a permanent condition of insecurity in which fighting is always possible and no one can trust anyone. In this condition: - No industry (why build if someone will take what you build?) - No agriculture (why plant if someone will harvest before you?) - No arts, letters, or society - "Continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" The state of nature is not a historical claim (Hobbes doesn't argue that prehistoric humans actually lived this way). It's a **logical deduction** from his premises about human equality and competitive desire. Remove the enforcing authority; these are the consequences. The state of nature also has **no morality** in the conventional sense. Without a common authority to define and enforce rules, there is no justice or injustice, no property, no right or wrong — only the natural right of every person to do whatever they judge necessary for their own preservation. This is the most radical move in the book: morality is not pre-political but political. It doesn't exist until a sovereign creates it. ### The social contract (chapters 14–21) The escape from the state of nature: rational self-interest. Hobbes's "laws of nature" (rational precepts for self-preservation) lead humans to **covenant** with one another — each person agrees to surrender their natural right to all things, on the condition that everyone else does the same, and to transfer that right to a **sovereign** who will enforce the agreement. The key features of Hobbes's social contract: **The sovereign is not a party to the contract.** The covenant is between the subjects. The sovereign receives authority from the covenant but doesn't covenant with anyone — which means the sovereign can't violate the contract (there is none to violate) and the subjects can't rightfully rebel (they agreed to obey). **Sovereignty must be absolute.** Divided sovereignty (separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism) is a contradiction — if the sovereign's authority can be checked by another body, then that other body is the real sovereign. Hobbes explicitly argued that the English Civil War was caused by divided sovereignty: Parliament and King both claimed supreme authority, and the result was war. The solution: one sovereign, undivided, unchallengeable. **The sovereign's duties.** The sovereign has one obligation (not contractual but rational): to maintain order and security. A sovereign who cannot protect the subjects forfeits their obedience — not because of a contractual violation but because the entire point of sovereignty is protection. "The obligation of subjects to the sovereign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth by which he is able to protect them." ### Parts III–IV: Of a Christian Common-wealth / Of the Kingdom of Darkness The second half of *Leviathan* — longer than the first but far less read — addresses the relationship between political and religious authority. Hobbes's arguments are radical: - The sovereign has authority over religious matters; there is no legitimate independent church authority - Much of Christian theology (immaterial souls, hell as a place, demonic possession) is based on misinterpretation of Scripture and philosophical error - The "Kingdom of Darkness" (Part IV) is Hobbes's term for the system of religious fraud — papal authority, priestly privilege, scholastic philosophy — that has kept populations in ignorance and served clerical interests These sections made *Leviathan* offensive to virtually every religious faction in England: Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans all found reasons to condemn it. The religious arguments are structurally important, though: Hobbes is clearing away the alternative foundations of authority (divine right, papal supremacy, religious conscience) to leave only the social contract. ## The Locke response [[John Locke]]'s *[[Two Treatises of Government]]* (1689) is the definitive response to Hobbes, accepting the social-contract framework while rejecting every major Hobbesian conclusion: | Hobbes (*Leviathan*) | Locke (*Two Treatises*) | |---|---| | State of nature is war of all against all | State of nature is governed by natural law; mostly peaceful | | Natural equality produces conflict | Natural equality produces natural rights | | The social contract creates morality | Natural rights exist prior to the contract | | Sovereignty must be absolute | Sovereignty is limited by natural rights | | Subjects cannot rebel | The people retain the right of revolution | | Property is created by the sovereign | Property exists in the state of nature (through labor) | The Hobbes-to-Locke arc is the foundation of modern political thought: Hobbes poses the problem (why submit to authority?); Locke provides the answer the liberal democratic tradition adopted (authority is legitimate only when it protects pre-existing natural rights and can be revoked when it doesn't). The American Declaration of Independence is Lockean, not Hobbesian — but the Hobbesian problem (what happens when authority collapses?) lurks beneath every Lockean solution. ## KB significance **1. The authoritarian template.** *Leviathan*'s argument — that order requires absolute, undivided sovereignty; that the alternative to strong authority is chaos; that subjects cannot rightfully resist — is the intellectual template for every authoritarian claim in the KB. The Hobbesian frame is what makes the following arguments *feel* rational: - Trump's "American carnage" (we are in or near the state of nature; only a strong leader can restore order) - The unitary executive doctrine (sovereignty must be undivided; congressional and judicial checks weaken the state) - [[Curtis Yarvin]]'s neoreaction (democracy is divided sovereignty and therefore produces chaos; monarchy is the Hobbesian solution) - [[Project 2025]]'s [[Schedule F]] (the administrative state divides sovereignty; the president must have absolute authority over the executive branch) Each of these claims assumes, implicitly or explicitly, a Hobbesian baseline: without concentrated authority, things fall apart. The KB's analytical task is to evaluate when this baseline is empirically warranted and when it's rhetorically manufactured. **2. The social-contract genealogy.** *Leviathan* created the framework within which every subsequent social-contract thinker worked. The sequence: Hobbes (absolute sovereignty, 1651) → Locke (limited government, natural rights, 1689) → Rousseau (popular sovereignty, general will, 1762) → Paine (democratic revolution, 1776/1791) → the American Founders (constitutional democracy, 1787–88) Each thinker accepts Hobbes's method (start from the state of nature, derive political authority from rational self-interest) while rejecting his conclusions. Understanding *Leviathan* is understanding the foundation on which the entire tradition was built. **3. The Machiavelli–Hobbes pipeline.** *[[The Prince]]* separated politics from morality empirically (studying what rulers actually do). *Leviathan* separated them philosophically (deriving political obligation from self-interest rather than divine command or natural hierarchy). Together they constitute the founding of political realism — the tradition that studies power as it is rather than as it should be. The KB's analytical method is a descendant of this tradition. **4. The sovereignty question.** *Leviathan*'s argument that sovereignty must be absolute and undivided is the philosophical ancestor of every contemporary debate about executive power, judicial review, congressional authority, and federalism. The Founders rejected Hobbesian absolutism but accepted the Hobbesian problem — which is why the Constitution is an elaborate system for dividing sovereignty without destroying it. Every contemporary attack on that system (from unitary executive theory to court-packing to Schedule F) is, whether consciously or not, a claim that the Founders were wrong and Hobbes was right: divided sovereignty doesn't work. ## See Also - [[Thomas Hobbes]] — the author - [[Niccolò Machiavelli]] — the political realist tradition's other founder - [[The Prince]] — the empirical complement to Hobbes's philosophical project - [[John Locke]] — the thinker who used Hobbes's framework to reach opposite conclusions - [[Two Treatises of Government]] — Locke's response - [[The Social Contract]] — Rousseau's radicalization of the social-contract tradition - [[Common Sense]] — Paine's application of Lockean (anti-Hobbesian) principles - [[Social Contract Theory]] — the broader framework - [[State of Nature]] — the foundational thought experiment - [[Curtis Yarvin]] — contemporary thinker who explicitly works in Hobbesian territory