The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is best known for his political

thought, and deservedly so. His vision of the world is strikingly original and still
relevant to contemporary politics. His main concern is the problem of social and
political order: how human beings can live together in peace and avoid the danger and
fear of civil conflict. He poses stark alternatives: we should give our obedience to an
unaccountable sovereign (a person or group empowered to decide every social and
political issue). Otherwise what awaits us is a state of nature that closely resembles civil
war – a situation of universal insecurity, where all have reason to fear violent death and
where rewarding human cooperation is all but impossible.

One controversy has dominated interpretations of Hobbes. Does he see human beings as
purely self-interested or egoistic? Several passages support such a reading, leading some
to think that his political conclusions can be avoided if we adopt a more realistic picture
of human nature. However, most scholars now accept that Hobbes himself had a much
more complex view of human motivation. A major theme below will be why the
problems he poses cannot be avoided simply by taking a less selfish view of human
nature.

Table of Contents
1.​ Introduction
2.​ Life and Times
3.​ Two Intellectual Influences
4.​ Ethics and Human Nature
a.​ Materialism Versus Self-Knowledge
b.​ The Poverty of Human Judgment and our Need for Science
c.​ Motivation
d.​ Political Philosophy
5.​ The Natural Condition of Mankind
a.​ The Laws of Nature and the Social Contract
b.​ Why Should we Obey the Sovereign?
c.​ Life Under the Sovereign
6.​ Conclusion
7.​ References and Further Reading

1. Introduction
Hobbes is the founding father of modern political philosophy. Directly or indirectly, he
has set the terms of debate about the fundamentals of political life right into our own
times. Few have liked his thesis, that the problems of political life mean that a society
should accept an unaccountable sovereign as its sole political authority. Nonetheless, we
still live in the world that Hobbes addressed head on: a world where human authority is
something that requires justification, and is automatically accepted by few; a world
where social and political inequality also appears questionable; and a world where
religious authority faces significant dispute. We can put the matter in terms of the
concern with equality and rights that Hobbes’s thought heralded: we live in a world
where all human beings are supposed to have rights, that is, moral claims that protect
their basic interests. But what or who determines what those rights are? And who will
enforce them? In other words, who will exercise the most important political powers,
when the basic assumption is that we all share the same entitlements?

We can see Hobbes’s importance if we briefly compare him with the most famous
political thinkers before and after him. A century before, Nicolo Machiavelli had
emphasized the harsh realities of power, as well as recalling ancient Roman experiences
of political freedom. Machiavelli appears as the first modern political thinker, because
like Hobbes he was no longer prepared to talk about politics in terms set by religious
faith (indeed, he was still more offensive than Hobbes to many orthodox believers),
instead, he looked upon politics as a secular discipline divorced from theology. But
unlike Hobbes, Machiavelli offers us no comprehensive philosophy: we have to
reconstruct his views on the importance and nature of freedom; it remains uncertain
which, if any, principles Machiavelli draws on in his apparent praise of amoral power
politics.

Writing a few years after Hobbes, John Locke had definitely accepted the terms of
debate Hobbes had laid down: how can human beings live together, when religious or
traditional justifications of authority are no longer effective or persuasive? How is
political authority justified and how far does it extend? In particular, are our political
rulers properly as unlimited in their powers as Hobbes had suggested? And if they are
not, what system of politics will ensure that they do not overstep the mark, do not
trespass on the rights of their subjects?

So, in assessing Hobbes’s political philosophy, our guiding questions can be: What did
Hobbes write that was so important? How was he able to set out a way of thinking about
politics and power that remains decisive nearly four centuries afterwards? We can get
some clues to this second question if we look at Hobbes’s life and times.

2. Life and Times

Hobbes’s biography is dominated by the political events in England and Scotland during
his long life. Born in 1588, the year the Spanish Armada made its ill-fated attempt to
invade England, he lived to the exceptional age of 91, dying in 1679. He was not born to
power or wealth or influence: the son of a disgraced village vicar, he was lucky that his
uncle was wealthy enough to provide for his education and that his intellectual talents
were soon recognized and developed (through thorough training in the classics of Latin
and Greek). Those intellectual abilities, and his uncle’s support, brought him to
university at Oxford. And these in turn—together with a good deal of common sense and
personal maturity—won him a place tutoring the son of an important noble family, the
Cavendishes. This meant that Hobbes entered circles where the activities of the King, of
Members of Parliament, and of other wealthy landowners were known and discussed,
and indeed influenced. Thus intellectual and practical ability brought Hobbes to a place
close to power—later he would even be math tutor to the future King Charles II.
Although this never made Hobbes powerful, it meant he was acquainted with and
indeed vulnerable to those who were. As the scene was being set for the Civil Wars of
1642-46 and 1648-51—wars that would lead to the King being executed and a republic
being declared—Hobbes felt forced to leave the country for his personal safety, and lived
in France from 1640 to 1651. Even after the monarchy had been restored in 1660,
Hobbes’s security was not always certain: powerful religious figures, critical of his
writings, made moves in Parliament that apparently led Hobbes to burn some of his
papers for fear of prosecution.

Thus Hobbes lived in a time of upheaval, sharper than any England has since known.
This turmoil had many aspects and causes, political and religious, military and
economic. England stood divided against itself in several ways. The rich and powerful
were divided in their support for the King, especially concerning the monarch’s powers
of taxation. Parliament was similarly divided concerning its own powers vis-à-vis the
King. Society was divided religiously, economically, and by region. Inequalities in wealth
were huge, and the upheavals of the Civil Wars saw the emergence of astonishingly
radical religious and political sects. (For instance, the Levellers called for much greater
equality in terms of wealth and political rights; the Diggers, more radical still, fought for
the abolition of wage labor.) Civil war meant that the country became militarily divided.
And all these divisions cut across one another: for example, the army of the republican
challenger, Cromwell, was the main home of the Levellers, yet Cromwell in turn would
act to destroy their power within the army’s ranks. In addition, England’s recent union
with Scotland was fragile at best, and was almost destroyed by King Charles I’s attempts
to impose consistency in religious practices. We shall see that Hobbes’s greatest fear was
social and political chaos—and he had ample opportunity both to observe it and to suffer
its effects.

Although social and political turmoil affected Hobbes’s life and shaped his thought, it
never hampered his intellectual development. His early position as a tutor gave him the
scope to read, write and publish (a brilliant translation of the Greek writer Thucydides
appeared in 1629), and brought him into contact with notable English intellectuals such
as Francis Bacon. His self-imposed exile in France, along with his emerging reputation
as a scientist and thinker, brought him into contact with major European intellectual
figures of his time, leading to exchange and controversy with figures such as Descartes,
Mersenne and Gassendi. Intensely disputatious, Hobbes repeatedly embroiled himself
in prolonged arguments with clerics, mathematicians, scientists and
philosophers—sometimes to the cost of his intellectual reputation. (For instance, he
argued repeatedly that it is possible to square the circle It is no accident that the phrase
is now proverbial for a problem that cannot be solved!) His writing was as undaunted by
age and ill health as it was by the events of his times. Though his health slowly
failed—from about sixty, he began to suffer shaking palsy, probably Parkinson’s disease,
which steadily worsened—even in his eighties he continued to dictate his thoughts to a
secretary, and to defend his quarter in various controversies.

Hobbes gained a reputation in many fields. He was known as a scientist (especially in

optics), as a mathematician (especially in geometry), as a translator of the classics, as a
writer on law, as a disputant in metaphysics and epistemology; not least, he became
notorious for his writings and disputes on religious questions. But it is for his writings
on morality and politics that he has, rightly, been most remembered. Without these,
scholars might remember Hobbes as an interesting intellectual of the seventeenth
century; but few philosophers would even recognize his name.

What are the writings that earned Hobbes his philosophical fame? The first was entitled
The Elements of Law (1640); this was Hobbes’s attempt to provide arguments
supporting the King against his challengers. De Cive [On the Citizen] (1642) has much in
common with Elements, and offers a clear, concise statement of Hobbes’s moral and
political philosophy. His most famous work is Leviathan, a classic of English prose
(1651; a slightly altered Latin edition appeared in 1668). Leviathan expands on the
argument of De Cive, mostly in terms of its huge second half that deals with questions of
religion. Other important works include: De Corpore [On the Body] (1655), which deals
with questions of metaphysics; De Homine [On Man] (1657); and Behemoth (published
1682, though written rather earlier), in which Hobbes gives his account of England’s
Civil Wars. But to understand the essentials of Hobbes’s ideas and system, one can rely
on De Cive and Leviathan. It is also worth noting that, although Leviathan is more
famous and more often read, De Cive actually gives a much more straightforward
account of Hobbes’s ideas. Readers whose main interest is in those ideas may wish to
skip the next section and go straight to ethics and human nature.

3. Two Intellectual Influences

As well as the political background just stressed, two influences are extremely marked in
Hobbes’s work. The first is a reaction against religious authority as it had been known,
and especially against the scholastic philosophy that accepted and defended such
authority. The second is a deep admiration for (and involvement in) the emerging
scientific method, alongside an admiration for a much older discipline, geometry. Both
influences affected how Hobbes expressed his moral and political ideas. In some areas it
is also clear that they significantly affected the ideas themselves.

Hobbes’s contempt for scholastic philosophy is boundless. Leviathan and other works
are littered with references to the “frequency of insignificant speech” in the speculations
of the scholastics, with their combinations of Christian theology and Aristotelian
metaphysics. Hobbes’s reaction, apart from much savage and sparkling sarcasm, is
twofold. In the first place, he makes very strong claims about the proper relation
between religion and politics. He was not (as many have charged) an atheist, but he was
deadly serious in insisting that theological disputes should be kept out of politics. (He
also adopts a strongly materialist metaphysics, that—as his critics were quick to
charge—makes it difficult to account for God’s existence as a spiritual entity.) For
Hobbes, the sovereign should determine the proper forms of religious worship, and
citizens never have duties to God that override their duty to obey political authority.
Second, this reaction against scholasticism shapes the presentation of Hobbes’s own
ideas. He insists that terms be clearly defined and relate to actual concrete
experiences—part of his empiricism. (Many early sections of Leviathan read rather like
a dictionary.) Commentators debate how seriously to take Hobbes’s stress on the
importance of definition, and whether it embodies a definite philosophical doctrine.
What is certain, and more important from the point of view of his moral and political
thought, is that he tries extremely hard to avoid any metaphysical categories that do not
relate to physical realities (especially the mechanical realities of matter and motion).
Commentators further disagree whether Hobbes’s often mechanical sounding
definitions of human nature and human behavior are actually important in shaping his
moral and political ideas—see Materialism versus self-knowledge below.

Hobbes’s determination to avoid the “insignificant” (that is, meaningless) speech of the
scholastics also overlaps with his admiration for the emerging physical sciences and for
geometry. His admiration is not so much for the emerging method of experimental
science, but rather for deductive science—science that deduces the workings of things
from basic first principles and from true definitions of the basic elements. Hobbes
therefore approves a mechanistic view of science and knowledge, one that models itself
very much on the clarity and deductive power exhibited in proofs in geometry. It is fair
to say that this a priori account of science has found little favor after Hobbes’s time. It
looks rather like a dead-end on the way to the modern idea of science based on patient
observation, theory-building and experiment. Nonetheless, it certainly provided Hobbes
with a method that he follows in setting out his ideas about human nature and politics.
As presented in Leviathan, especially, Hobbes seems to build from first elements of
human perception and reasoning, up to a picture of human motivation and action, to a
deduction of the possible forms of political relations and their relative desirability. Once
more, it can be disputed whether this method is significant in shaping those ideas, or
merely provides Hobbes with a distinctive way of presenting them.

4. Ethics and Human Nature

Hobbes’s moral thought is difficult to disentangle from his politics. On his view, what we
ought to do depends greatly on the situation in which we find ourselves. Where political
authority is lacking (as in his famous natural condition of mankind), our fundamental
right seems to be to save our skins, by whatever means we think fit. Where political
authority exists, our duty seems to be quite straightforward: to obey those in power.

But we can usefully separate the ethics from the politics if we follow Hobbes’s own
division. For him ethics is concerned with human nature, while political philosophy
deals with what happens when human beings interact. What, then, is Hobbes’s view of
human nature?

a. Materialism Versus Self-Knowledge

Reading the opening chapters of Leviathan is a confusing business, and the reason for
this is already apparent in Hobbes’s very short Introduction. He begins by telling us that
the human body is like a machine, and that political organization (the commonwealth)
is like an artificial human being. He ends by saying that the truth of his ideas can be
gauged only by self-examination, by looking into our selves to adjudge our characteristic
thoughts and passions, which form the basis of all human action. But what is the
relationship between these two very different claims? For obviously when we look into
our selves we do not see mechanical pushes and pulls. This mystery is hardly answered
by Hobbes’s method in the opening chapters, where he persists in talking about all
manner of psychological phenomena—from emotions to thoughts to whole trains of
reasoning – as products of mechanical interactions. (As to what he will say about
successful political organization, the resemblance between the commonwealth and a
functioning human being is slim indeed. Hobbes’s only real point seems to be that there
should be a head that decides most of the important things that the body does.)

Most commentators now agree with an argument made in the 1960’s by the political
philosopher Leo Strauss. Hobbes draws on his notion of a mechanistic science, that
works deductively from first principles, in setting out his ideas about human nature.
Science provides him with a distinctive method and some memorable metaphors and
similes. What it does not provide—nor could it, given the rudimentary state of
physiology and psychology in Hobbes’s day—are any decisive or substantive ideas about
what human nature really is. Those ideas may have come, as Hobbes also claims, from
self-examination. In all likelihood, they actually derived from his reflection on
contemporary events and his reading of classics of political history such as Thucydides.

This is not to say that we should ignore Hobbes’s ideas on human nature—far from it.
But it does mean we should not be misled by scientific imagery that stems from an in
fact non-existent science (and also, to some extent, from an unproven and uncertain
metaphysics). The point is important mainly when it comes to a central interpretative
point in Hobbes’s work: whether or not he thinks of human beings as mechanical
objects, programmed as it were to pursue their self-interest. Some have suggested that
Hobbes’s mechanical world-view leaves no room for the influence of moral ideas, that he
thinks the only effective influence on our behavior will be incentives of pleasure and
pain. But while it is true that Hobbes sometimes says things like this, we should be clear
that the ideas fit together only in a metaphorical way. For example, there is no reason
why moral ideas should not “get into” the mechanisms that drive us round (like so many
clock-work dolls perhaps?). Likewise, there is no reason why pursuing pleasure and pain
should work in our self-interest. (What self-interest is depends on the time-scale we
adopt, and how effectively we might achieve this goal also depends on our insight into
what harms and benefits us). If we want to know what drives human beings, on
Hobbes’s view, we must read carefully all he says about this, as well as what he needs to
assume if the rest of his thought is to make sense. The mechanistic metaphor is
something of a red herring and, in the end, probably less useful than his other starting
point in Leviathan, the Delphic epithet: nosce teipsum (know thyself).

b. The Poverty of Human Judgment and our Need for

Science
There are two major aspects to Hobbes’s picture of human nature. As we have seen, and
will explore below, what motivates human beings to act is extremely important to
Hobbes. The other aspect concerns human powers of judgment and reasoning, about
which Hobbes tends to be extremely skeptical. Like many philosophers before him,
Hobbes wants to present a more solid and certain account of human morality than is
contained in everyday beliefs. Plato had contrasted knowledge with opinion. Hobbes
contrasts science with a whole raft of less reliable forms of belief—from probable
inference based on experience, right down to “absurdity, to which no living creature is
subject but man” (Leviathan, v.7).
Hobbes has several reasons for thinking that human judgment is unreliable, and needs
to be guided by science. Our judgments tend to be distorted by self-interest or by the
pleasures and pains of the moment. We may share the same basic passions, but the
various things of the world affect us all very differently; and we are inclined to use our
feelings as measures for others. It becomes dogmatic through vanity and morality, as
with “men vehemently in love with their own new opinions…and obstinately bent to
maintain them, [who give] their opinions also that reverenced name of conscience”
(Leviathan, vii.4). When we use words which lack any real objects of reference, or are
unclear about the meaning of the words we use, the danger is not only that our thoughts
will be meaningless, but also that we will fall into violent dispute. (Hobbes has scholastic
philosophy in mind, but he also makes related points about the dangerous effects of
faulty political ideas and ideologies.) We form beliefs about supernatural entities, fairies
and spirits and so on, and fear follows where belief has gone, further distorting our
judgment. Judgment can be swayed this way and that by rhetoric, that is, by the
persuasive and “colored speech” of others, who can deliberately deceive us and may well
have purposes that go against the common good or indeed our own good. Not least,
much judgment is concerned with what we should do now, that is, with future events,
“the future being but a fiction of the mind” (Leviathan, iii.7) and therefore not reliably
known to us.

For Hobbes, it is only science, “the knowledge of consequences” (Leviathan, v.17), that
offers reliable knowledge of the future and overcomes the frailties of human judgment.
Unfortunately, his picture of science, based on crudely mechanistic premises and
developed through deductive demonstrations, is not even plausible in the physical
sciences. When it comes to the complexities of human behavior, Hobbes’s model of
science is even less satisfactory. He is certainly an acute and wise commentator of
political affairs; we can praise him for his hard-headedness about the realities of human
conduct, and for his determination to create solid chains of logical reasoning.
Nonetheless, this does not mean that Hobbes was able to reach a level of scientific
certainty in his judgments that had been lacking in all previous reflection on morals and
politics.

c. Motivation
The most consequential aspect of Hobbes’s account of human nature centers on his
ideas about human motivation, and this topic is therefore at the heart of many debates
about how to understand Hobbes’s philosophy. Many interpreters have presented the
Hobbesian agent as a self-interested, rationally calculating actor (those ideas have been
important in modern political philosophy and economic thought, especially in terms of
rational choice theories). It is true that some of the problems that face people like
this—rational egoists, as philosophers call them—are similar to the problems Hobbes
wants to solve in his political philosophy. And it is also very common for first-time
readers of Hobbes to get the impression that he believes we are all basically selfish.

There are good reasons why earlier interpreters and new readers tend to think the
Hobbesian agent is ultimately self-interested. Hobbes likes to make bold and even
shocking claims to get his point across. “I obtained two absolutely certain postulates of
human nature,” he says, “one, the postulate of human greed by which each man insists
upon his own private use of common property; the other, the postulate of natural
reason, by which each man strives to avoid violent death” (De Cive, Epistle Dedicatory).
What could be clearer?—We want all we can get, and we certainly want to avoid death.
There are two problems with thinking that this is Hobbes’s considered view, however.
First, quite simply, it represents a false view of human nature. People do all sorts of
altruistic things that go against their interests. They also do all sorts of needlessly cruel
things that go against self-interest (think of the self-defeating lengths that revenge can
run to). So it would be uncharitable to interpret Hobbes this way, if we can find a more
plausible account in his work. Second, in any case Hobbes often relies on a more
sophisticated view of human nature. He describes or even relies on motives that go
beyond or against self-interest, such as pity, a sense of honor or courage, and so on. And
he frequently emphasizes that we find it difficult to judge or appreciate just what our
interests are anyhow. (Some also suggest that Hobbes’s views on the matter shifted away
from egoism after De Cive, but the point is not crucial here.)

The upshot is that Hobbes does not think that we are basically or reliably selfish; and he
does not think we are fundamentally or reliably rational in our ideas about what is in
our interests. He is rarely surprised to find human beings doing things that go against
self-interest: we will cut off our noses to spite our faces, we will torture others for their
eternal salvation, we will charge to our deaths for love of country. In fact, a lot of the
problems that befall human beings, according to Hobbes, result from their being too
little concerned with self-interest. Too often, he thinks, we are too much concerned with
what others think of us, or inflamed by religious doctrine, or carried away by others’
inflammatory words. This weakness as regards our self-interest has even led some to
think that Hobbes is advocating a theory known as ethical egoism. This is to claim that
Hobbes bases morality upon self-interest, claiming that we ought to do what it is most
in our interest to do. But we shall see that this would over-simplify the conclusions that
Hobbes draws from his account of human nature.

d. Political Philosophy
This is Hobbes’s picture of human nature. We are needy and vulnerable. We are easily
led astray in our attempts to know the world around us. Our capacity to reason is as
fragile as our capacity to know; it relies upon language and is prone to error and undue
influence. When we act, we may do so selfishly or impulsively or in ignorance, on the
basis of faulty reasoning or bad theology or others’ emotive speech.

What is the political fate of this rather pathetic sounding creature—that is, of us?
Unsurprisingly, Hobbes thinks little happiness can be expected of our lives together. The
best we can hope for is peaceful life under an authoritarian-sounding sovereign. The
worst, on Hobbes’s account, is what he calls the natural condition of mankind, a state of
violence, insecurity and constant threat. In outline, Hobbes’s argument is that the
alternative to government is a situation no one could reasonably wish for, and that any
attempt to make government accountable to the people must undermine it, so
threatening the situation of non-government that we must all wish to avoid. Our only
reasonable option, therefore, is a “sovereign” authority that is totally unaccountable to
its subjects. Let us deal with the “natural condition” of non-government, also called the
“state of nature,” first of all.

5. The Natural Condition of Mankind

The state of nature is “natural” in one specific sense only. For Hobbes political authority
is artificial: in the “natural” condition human beings lack government, which is an
authority created by men. What is Hobbes’s reasoning here? He claims that the only
authority that naturally exists among human beings is that of a mother over her child,
because the child is so very much weaker than the mother (and indebted to her for its
survival). Among adult human beings this is invariably not the case. Hobbes concedes
an obvious objection, admitting that some of us are much stronger than others. And
although he is very sarcastic about the idea that some are wiser than others, he does not
have much difficulty with the idea that some are fools and others are dangerously
cunning. Nonetheless, it is almost invariably true that every human being is capable of
killing any other. “Even the strongest must sleep; even the weakest might persuade
others to help him kill another”. (Leviathan, xiii.1-2) Because adults are equal in this
capacity to threaten one another’s lives, Hobbes claims there is no natural source of
authority to order their lives together. (He is strongly opposing arguments that
established monarchs have a natural or God-given right to rule over us.)

Thus, as long as human beings have not successfully arranged some form of
government, they live in Hobbes’s state of nature. Such a condition might occur at the
“beginning of time” (see Hobbes’s comments on Cain and Abel, Leviathan, xiii.11, Latin
version only), or in “primitive” societies (Hobbes thought the American Indians lived in
such a condition). But the real point for Hobbes is that a state of nature could just as
well occur in seventeenth century England, should the King’s authority be successfully
undermined. It could occur tomorrow in every modern society, for example, if the police
and army suddenly refused to do their jobs on behalf of government. Unless some
effective authority stepped into the King’s place (or the place of army and police and
government), Hobbes argues the result is doomed to be deeply awful, nothing less than
a state of war.

Why should peaceful cooperation be impossible without an overarching authority?

Hobbes provides a series of powerful arguments that suggest it is extremely unlikely that
human beings will live in security and peaceful cooperation without government.
(Anarchism, the thesis that we should live without government, of course disputes these
arguments.) His most basic argument is threefold. (Leviathan, xiii.3-9) (i) He thinks we
will compete, violently compete, to secure the basic necessities of life and perhaps to
make other material gains. (ii) He argues that we will challenge others and fight out of
fear (“diffidence”), so as to ensure our personal safety. (iii) And he believes that we will
seek reputation (“glory”), both for its own sake and for its protective effects (for
example, so that others will be afraid to challenge us).

This is a more difficult argument than it might seem. Hobbes does not suppose that we
are all selfish, that we are all cowards, or that we are all desperately concerned with how
others see us. Two points, though. First, he does think that some of us are selfish, some
of us cowardly, and some of us “vainglorious” (perhaps some people are of all of these!).
Moreover, many of these people will be prepared to use violence to attain their
ends—especially if there is no government or police to stop them. In this Hobbes is
surely correct. Second, in some situations it makes good sense, at least in the short term,
to use violence and to behave selfishly, fearfully or vaingloriously. If our lives seem to be
at stake, after all, we are unlikely to have many scruples about stealing a loaf of bread; if
we perceive someone as a deadly threat, we may well want to attack first, while his guard
is down; if we think that there are lots of potential attackers out there, it is going to
make perfect sense to get a reputation as someone who should not be messed with. In
Hobbes’s words, “the wickedness of bad men also compels good men to have recourse,
for their own protection, to the virtues of war, which are violence and fraud”. (De Cive,
Epistle Dedicatory) As well as being more complex than first appears, Hobbes’s
argument becomes very difficult to refute.

Underlying this most basic argument is an important consideration about insecurity. As

we shall see Hobbes places great weight on contracts (thus some interpreters see
Hobbes as heralding a market society dominated by contractual exchanges). In
particular, he often speaks of “covenants,” by which he means a contract where one
party performs his part of the bargain later than the other. In the state of nature such
agreements are not going to work. Only the weakest will have good reason to perform
the second part of a covenant, and then only if the stronger party is standing over them.
Yet a huge amount of human cooperation relies on trust, that others will return their
part of the bargain over time. A similar point can be made about property, most of
which we cannot carry about with us and watch over. This means we must rely on others
respecting our possessions over extended periods of time. If we cannot do this, then
many of the achievements of human society that involve putting hard work into land
(farming, building) or material objects (the crafts, or modern industrial production, still
unknown in Hobbes’s time) will be near impossible.

One can reasonably object to such points: Surely there are basic duties to reciprocate
fairly and to behave in a trustworthy manner? Even if there is no government providing
a framework of law, judgment and punishment, do not most people have a reasonable
sense of what is right and wrong, which will prevent the sort of contract-breaking and
generalized insecurity that Hobbes is concerned with? Indeed, should not our basic
sense of morality prevent much of the greed, pre-emptive attack and reputation-seeking
that Hobbes stressed in the first place? This is the crunch point of Hobbes’s argument,
and it is here (if anywhere) that one can accuse Hobbes of pessimism. He makes two
claims. The first concerns our duties in the state of nature (that is, the so-called “right of
nature”). The second follows from this, and is less often noticed: it concerns the danger
posed by our different and variable judgments of what is right and wrong.

On Hobbes’s view the right of nature is quite simple to define. Naturally speaking—that
is, outside of civil society – we have a right to do whatever we think will ensure our
self-preservation. The worst that can happen to us is violent death at the hands of
others. If we have any rights at all, if (as we might put it) nature has given us any rights
whatsoever, then the first is surely this: the right to prevent violent death befalling us.
But Hobbes says more than this, and it is this point that makes his argument so
powerful. We do not just have a right to ensure our self-preservation: we each have a
right to judge what will ensure our self-preservation. And this is where Hobbes’s picture
of humankind becomes important. Hobbes has given us good reasons to think that
human beings rarely judge wisely. Yet in the state of nature no one is in a position to
successfully define what is good judgment. If I judge that killing you is a sensible or even
necessary move to safeguard my life, then—in Hobbes’s state of nature – I have a right
to kill you. Others might judge the matter differently, of course. Almost certainly you
will have quite a different view of things (perhaps you were just stretching your arms,
not raising a musket to shoot me). Because we are all insecure, because trust is
more-or-less absent, there is little chance of our sorting out misunderstandings
peacefully, nor can we rely on some (trusted) third party to decide whose judgment is
right. We all have to be judges in our own causes, and the stakes are very high indeed:
life or death.
For this reason Hobbes makes very bold claims that sound totally amoral. “To this war
of every man against every man,” he says, “this also is consequent [i.e., it follows]: that
nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have no
place [in the state of nature]”. (Leviathan, xiii.13) He further argues that in the state of
nature we each have a right to all things, “even to one another’s body’ (Leviathan, xiv.4).
Hobbes is dramatizing his point, but the core is defensible. If I judge that I need such
and such—an object, another person’s labor, another person’s death—to ensure my
continued existence, then in the state of nature, there is no agreed authority to decide
whether I’m right or wrong. New readers of Hobbes often suppose that the state of
nature would be a much nicer place, if only he were to picture human beings with some
basic moral ideas. But this is naïve: unless people share the same moral ideas, not just at
the level of general principles but also at the level of individual judgment, then the
challenge he poses remains unsolved: human beings who lack some shared authority are
almost certain to fall into dangerous and deadly conflict.

There are different ways of interpreting Hobbes’s view of the absence of moral
constraints in the state of nature. Some think that Hobbes is imagining human beings
who have no idea of social interaction and therefore no ideas about right and wrong. In
this case, the natural condition would be a purely theoretical construction, and would
demonstrate what both government and society do for human beings. (A famous
statement about the state of nature in De Cive (viii.1) might support this interpretation:
“looking at men as if they had just emerged from the earth like mushrooms and grown
up without any obligation to each other…”) Another, complementary view reads Hobbes
as a psychological egoist, so that—in the state of nature as elsewhere – he is merely
describing the interaction of ultimately selfish and amoral human beings.

Others suppose that Hobbes has a much more complex picture of human motivation, so
that there is no reason to think moral ideas are absent in the state of nature. In
particular, it is historically reasonable to think that Hobbes invariably has civil war in
mind, when he describes our “natural condition.” If we think of civil war, we need to
imagine people who have lived together and indeed still do live together—huddled
together in fear in their houses, banded together as armies or guerrillas or groups of
looters. The problem here is not a lack of moral ideas—far from it – rather that moral
ideas and judgments differ enormously. This means (for example) that two people who
are fighting tooth and nail over a cow or a gun can both think they are perfectly entitled
to the object and both think they are perfectly right to kill the other—a point Hobbes
makes explicitly and often. It also enables us to see that many Hobbesian conflicts are
about religious ideas or political ideals (as well as self-preservation and so on)—as in the
British Civil War raging while Hobbes wrote Leviathan, and in the many violent
sectarian conflicts throughout the world today.
In the end, though, whatever account of the state of nature and its (a) morality we
attribute to Hobbes, we must remember that it is meant to function as a powerful and
decisive threat: if we do not heed Hobbes’s teachings and fail to respect existing political
authority, then the natural condition and its horrors of war await us.

a. The Laws of Nature and the Social Contract

Hobbes thinks the state of nature is something we ought to avoid, at any cost except our
own self-preservation (this being our “right of nature,” as we saw above). But what sort
of ought is this? There are two basic ways of interpreting Hobbes here. It might be a
counsel of prudence: avoid the state of nature, if you’re concerned to avoid violent
death. In this case Hobbes’s advice only applies to us (i) if we agree that violent death is
what we should fear most and should therefore avoid; and (ii) if we agree with Hobbes
that only an unaccountable sovereign stands between human beings and the state of
nature. This line of thought fits well with an egoistic reading of Hobbes, but it faces
serious problems, as will be seen.

The other way of interpreting Hobbes is not without problems either. This takes Hobbes
to be saying that we ought, morally speaking, to avoid the state of nature. We have a
duty to do what we can to avoid this situation arising, and a duty to end it, if at all
possible. Hobbes often makes his view clear, that we have such moral obligations. But
then two difficult questions arise: Why these obligations? And why are they obligatory?

Hobbes frames the issues in terms of an older vocabulary, using the idea of natural law
that many ancient and medieval philosophers had relied on. Like them, he thinks that
human reason can discern some eternal principles to govern our conduct. These
principles are independent of (though also complementary to) whatever moral
instruction we might get from God or religion. In other words, they are laws given by
nature rather than revealed by God. But Hobbes makes radical changes to the content of
these so-called laws of nature. In particular, he does not think that natural law provides
any scope whatsoever to criticize or disobey the actual laws made by a government. He
thus disagrees with those Protestants who thought that religious conscience might
sanction disobedience of immoral laws, and with Catholics who thought that the
commandments of the Pope have primacy over those of national political authorities.

Although he sets out nineteen laws of nature, it is the first two that are politically crucial.
A third, that stresses the important of keeping to contracts we have entered into, is
important in Hobbes’s moral justifications of obedience to the sovereign. (The
remaining sixteen can be quite simply encapsulated in the formula, do as you would be
done by. While the details are important for scholars of Hobbes, they do not affect the
overall theory and will be ignored here.)

The first law reads as follows:

Every man ought to endeavor peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it, and when
he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war.
(Leviathan, xiv.4)

This repeats the points we have already seen about our right of nature, so long as peace
does not appear to be a realistic prospect. The second law of nature is more complicated:

That a man be willing, when others are so too, as far-forth as for peace and defense
of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things, and be
contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men
against himself. (Leviathan, xiv.5)

What Hobbes tries to tackle here is the transition from the state of nature to civil
society. But how he does this is misleading and has generated much confusion and
disagreement. The way that Hobbes describes this second law of nature makes it look as
if we should all put down our weapons, give up (much of) our “right of nature,” and
jointly authorize a sovereign who will tell us what is permitted and punish us if we do
not obey. But the problem is obvious. If the state of nature is anything like as bad as
Hobbes has argued, then there is just no way people could ever make an agreement
like this or put it into practice.

At the end of Leviathan, Hobbes seems to concede this point, saying “there is scarce a
commonwealth in the world whose beginnings can in conscience be justified” (Review
and Conclusion, 8). That is: governments have invariably been foisted upon people by
force and fraud, not by collective agreement. But Hobbes means to defend every existing
government that is powerful enough to secure peace among its subjects—not just a
mythical government that’s been created by a peaceful contract out of a state of nature.
His basic claim is that we should behave as if we had voluntarily entered into such a
contract with everyone else in our society—everyone else, that is, except the sovereign
authority.
In Hobbes’s myth of the social contract, everyone except the person or group who will
wield sovereign power lays down their “right to all things.” They agree to limit
drastically their right of nature, retaining only a right to defend their lives in case of
immediate threat. (How limited this right of nature becomes in civil society has caused
much dispute, because deciding what is an immediate threat is a question of judgment.
It certainly permits us to fight back if the sovereign tries to kill us. But what if the
sovereign conscripts us as soldiers? What if the sovereign looks weak and we doubt
whether he can continue to secure peace…?) The sovereign, however, retains his (or her,
or their) right of nature, which we have seen is effectively a right to all things—to decide
what everyone else should do, to decide the rules of property, to judge disputes and so
on. Hobbes concedes that there are moral limits on what sovereigns should do (God
might call a sovereign to account). However, since in any case of dispute the sovereign is
the only rightful judge—on this earth, that is – those moral limits make no practical
difference. In every moral and political matter, the decisive question for Hobbes is
always: who is to judge? As we have seen, in the state of nature, each of us is judge in
our own cause, part of the reason why Hobbes thinks it is inevitably a state of war. Once
civil society exists, the only rightful judge is the sovereign.

b. Why Should we Obey the Sovereign?

If we had all made a voluntary contract, a mutual promise, then it might seem half-way
plausible to think we have an obligation to obey the sovereign (although even this
requires the claim that promising is a moral value that overrides all others). If we have
been conquered or, more fortunately, have simply been born into a society with an
established political authority, this seems quite improbable. Hobbes has to make three
steps here, all of which have seemed weak to many of his readers. First of all, he insists
that promises made under threat of violence are nonetheless freely made, and just as
binding as any others. Second, he has to put great weight on the moral value of promise
keeping, which hardly fits with the absence of duties in the state of nature. Third, he has
to give a story of how those of us born and raised in a political society have made some
sort of implied promise to each other to obey, or at least, he has to show that we are
bound (either morally or out of self-interest) to behave as if we had made such a
promise.

In the first place, Hobbes draws on his mechanistic picture of the world, to suggest that
threats of force do not deprive us of liberty. Liberty, he says, is freedom of motion, and I
am free to move whichever way I wish, unless I am literally enchained. If I yield to
threats of violence, that is my choice, for physically I could have done otherwise. If I
obey the sovereign for fear of punishment or in fear of the state of nature, then that is
equally my choice. Such obedience then comes, for Hobbes, to constitute a promise that
I will continue to obey.

Second, promises carry a huge moral weight for Hobbes, as they do in all social contract
theories. The question, however, is why we should think they are so important. Why
should my (coerced) promise oblige me, given the wrong you committed in threatening
me and demanding my valuables? Hobbes has no good answer to this question (but see
below, on egoistic interpretations of Hobbes’s thinking here). His theory suggests that
(in the state of nature) you could do me no wrong, as the right of nature dictates that we
all have a right to all things. Likewise, promises do not oblige in the state of nature,
inasmuch as they go against our right of nature. In civil society, the sovereign’s laws
dictate what is right and wrong; if your threat was wrongful, then my promise will not
bind me. But as the sovereign is outside of the original contract, he sets the terms for
everyone else: so his threats create obligations.

As this suggests, Hobbesian promises are strangely fragile. Implausibly binding so long
as a sovereign exists to adjudicate and enforce them, they lose all power should things
revert to a state of nature. Relatedly, they seem to contain not one jot of loyalty. To be
logically consistent, Hobbes needs to be politically implausible. Now there are passages
where Hobbes sacrifices consistency for plausibility, arguing we have a duty to fight for
our (former) sovereign even in the midst of civil war. Nonetheless the logic of his theory
suggests that, as soon as government starts to weaken and disorder sets in, our duty of
obedience lapses. That is, when the sovereign power needs our support, because it is no
longer able to coerce us, there is no effective judge or enforcer of covenants, so that such
promises no longer override our right of nature. This turns common sense on its head.
Surely a powerful government can afford to be challenged, for instance by civil
disobedience or conscientious objection? But when civil conflict and the state of nature
threaten, in other words when government is failing, then we might reasonably think
that political unity is as morally important as Hobbes always suggests. A similar
question of loyalty also comes up when the sovereign power has been usurped—when
Cromwell has supplanted the King, when a foreign invader has ousted our government.
Right from the start, Hobbes’s critics saw that his theory makes turncoats into moral
heroes: our allegiance belongs to whoever happens to be holding the gun(s). Perversely,
the only crime the makers of a coup can commit is to fail.

Why does this problem come about? To overcome the fact that his contract is a fiction,
Hobbes is driven to construct a “sort of” promise out of the fact of our subjugation to
whatever political authority exists. He stays wedded to the idea that obedience can only
find a moral basis in a “voluntary” promise, because only this seems to justify the almost
unlimited obedience and renunciation of individual judgment he is determined to prove.
It is no surprise that Hobbes’s arguments creak at every point: nothing could bear the
weight of justifying such an overriding duty.

All the difficulties in finding a reliable moral obligation to obey might tempt us back to
the idea that Hobbes is some sort of egoist. However, the difficulties with this tack are
even greater. There are two sorts of egoism commentators have attributed to Hobbes:
psychological and ethical. The first theory says that human beings always act
egoistically, the second that they ought to act egoistically. Either view might support this
simple idea: we should obey the sovereign, because his political authority is what keeps
us from the evils of the natural condition. But the basic problem with such egoistic
interpretations, from the point of view of Hobbes’s system of politics, is shown when we
think about cases where selfishness seems to conflict with the commands of the
sovereign—for example, where illegal conduct will benefit us or keep us from danger.
For a psychologically egoist agent, such behavior will be irresistible; for an ethically
egoist agent, it will be morally obligatory. Now, providing the sovereign is sufficiently
powerful and well-informed, he can prevent many such cases arising by threatening and
enforcing punishments of those who disobey. Effective threats of punishment mean that
obedience is in our self-interest. But such threats will not be effective when we think
our disobedience can go undetected. After Orwell’s 1984 we can imagine a state that is
so powerful that no reasonable person would ever think disobedience could pay. But for
Hobbes, such a powerful sovereign was not even conceivable: he would have had to
assume that there would be many situations where people could reasonably hope to “get
away with it.” (Likewise, under non-totalitarian, liberal politics, there are many
situations where illegal behavior is very unlikely to be detected or punished.) So, still
thinking of egoistic agents, the more people do get away with it, the more reason others
have to think they can do the same. Thus the problem of disobedience threatens to
“snowball,” undermining the sovereign and plunging selfish agents back into the chaos
of the state of nature.

In other words, sovereignty as Hobbes imagined it, and liberal political authority as we
know it, can only function where people feel some additional motivation apart from
pure self-interest. Moreover, there is strong evidence that Hobbes was well aware of
this. Part of Hobbes’s interest in religion (a topic that occupies half of Leviathan) lies in
its power to shape human conduct. Sometimes this does seem to work through
self-interest, as in crude threats of damnation and hell-fire. But Hobbes’s main interest
lies in the educative power of religion, and indeed of political authority. Religious
practices, the doctrines taught in the universities (!), the beliefs and habits inculcated by
the institutions of government and society: how these can encourage and secure respect
for law and authority seem to be even more important to Hobbes’s political solutions
than his theoretical social contract or shaky appeals to simple self-interest.
What are we to conclude, then, given the difficulties in finding a reliable moral or selfish
justification for obedience? In the end, for Hobbes, everything rides on the value of
peace. Hobbes wants to say both that civil order is in our “enlightened” self-interest, and
that it is of overwhelming moral value. Life is never going to be perfect for us, and life
under the sovereign is the best we can do. Recognizing this aspect of everyone’s
self-interest should lead us to recognize the moral value of supporting whatever
authority we happen to live under. For Hobbes, this moral value is so great—and the
alternatives so stark – that it should override every threat to our self-interest except the
imminent danger of death. The million-dollar question is then: is a life of obedience to
the sovereign really the best human beings can hope for?

c. Life Under the Sovereign

Hobbes has definite ideas about the proper nature, scope and exercise of sovereignty.
Much that he says is cogent, and much of it can reduce the worries we might have about
living under this drastically authoritarian sounding regime. Many commentators have
stressed, for example, the importance Hobbes places upon the rule of law. His claim that
much of our freedom, in civil society, “depends on the silence of the laws” is often
quoted (Leviathan, xxi.18). In addition, Hobbes makes many points that are obviously
aimed at contemporary debates about the rights of King and Parliament—especially
about the sovereign’s rights as regards taxation and the seizure of property, and about
the proper relation between religion and politics. Some of these points continue to be
relevant, others are obviously anachronistic: evidently Hobbes could not have imagined
the modern state, with its vast bureaucracies, massive welfare provision and
complicated interfaces with society. Nor could he have foreseen how incredibly powerful
the state might become, meaning that sovereigns such as Hitler or Stalin might starve,
brutalize and kill their subjects, to such an extent that the state of nature looks clearly
preferable.

However, the problem with all of Hobbes’s notions about sovereignty is that—on his
account – it is not Hobbes the philosopher, nor we the citizens, who decide what counts
as the proper nature, scope or exercise of sovereignty. He faces a systematic problem:
justifying any limits or constraints on the sovereign involves making judgments about
moral or practical requirements. But one of his greatest insights, still little recognized by
many moral philosophers, is that any right or entitlement is only practically meaningful
when combined with a concrete judgment as to what it dictates in some given case.
Hobbes’s own failure, however understandable, to foresee the growth of government
and its powers only supports this thought: that the proper nature, scope or exercise of
sovereignty is a matter of complex judgment. Alone among the people who comprise
Hobbes’s commonwealth, it is the sovereign who judges what form he should appear in,
how far he should reach into the lives of his subjects, and how he should exercise his
powers.

It should be added that the one part of his system that Hobbes concedes not to be
proven with certainty is just this question: who or what should constitute the sovereign
power. It was natural for Hobbes to think of a King, or indeed a Queen (he was born
under Elizabeth I). But he was certainly very familiar with ancient forms of government,
including aristocracy (government by an elite) and democracy (government by the
citizens, who formed a relatively small group within the total population). Hobbes was
also aware that an assembly such as Parliament could constitute a sovereign body. All
have advantages and disadvantages, he argues. But the unity that comes about from
having a single person at the apex, together with fixed rules of succession that pre-empt
dispute about who this person should be, makes monarchy Hobbes’s preferred option.

In fact, if we want to crack open Hobbes’s sovereign, to be able to lay down concrete
ideas about its nature and limits, we must begin with the question of judgment. For
Hobbes, dividing capacities to judge between different bodies is tantamount to letting
the state of nature straight back in. “For what is it to divide the power of a
commonwealth, but to dissolve it; for powers divided mutually destroy each other”.
(Leviathan, xxix.12; cf De Cive, xii.5) Beyond the example of England in the 1640s,
Hobbes hardly bothers to argue the point, although it is crucial to his entire theory.
Always in his mind is the Civil War that arose when Parliament claimed the right to
judge rules of taxation, and thereby prevented the King from ruling and making war as
he saw fit, and when churches and religious sects claimed prerogatives that went against
the King’s decisions.

Especially given modern experiences of the division of powers, however, it is easy to see
that these examples are extreme and atypical. We might recall the American
constitution, where powers of legislation, execution and case-by-case judgment are
separated (to Congress, President and the judiciary respectively) and counter-balance
one another. Each of these bodies is responsible for judging different questions. There
are often, of course, boundary disputes, as to whether legislative, executive or judicial
powers should apply to a given issue, and no one body is empowered to settle this
crucial question of judgment. Equally obviously, however, such disputes have not led to
a state of nature (well, at least if we think of the US after the Civil War). For Hobbes it is
simply axiomatic that disputation as to who should judge important social and political
issues spells the end of the commonwealth. For us, it is equally obvious that only a few
extreme forms of dispute have this very dangerous power. Dividing the powers that are
important to government need not leave a society more open to those dangerous
conflicts. Indeed, many would now argue that political compromises which provide
different groups and bodies with independent space to judge certain social or political
issues can be crucial for preventing disputes from escalating into violent conflict or civil
war.

6. Conclusion
What happens, then, if we do not follow Hobbes in his arguments that judgment must,
by necessity or by social contract or both, be the sole province of the sovereign? If we are
optimists about the power of human judgment, and about the extent of moral consensus
among human beings, we have a straightforward route to the concerns of modern
liberalism. Our attention will not be on the question of social and political order, rather
on how to maximize liberty, how to define social justice, how to draw the limits of
government power, and how to realize democratic ideals. We will probably interpret
Hobbes as a psychological egoist, and think that the problems of political order that
obsessed him were the product of an unrealistic view of human nature, or unfortunate
historical circumstances, or both. In this case, I suggest, we might as well not have read
Hobbes at all.

If we are less optimistic about human judgment in morals and politics, however, we
should not doubt that Hobbes’s problems remain our problems. But hindsight shows
grave limitations to his solutions. Theoretically, Hobbes fails to prove that we have an
almost unlimited obligation to obey the sovereign. His arguments that sovereignty—the
power to judge moral and political matters, and enforce those judgments—cannot be
divided are not only weak; they are simply refuted by the (relatively) successful
distribution of powers in modern liberal societies. Not least, the horrific crimes of
twentieth century dictatorships show beyond doubt that judgment about right and
wrong cannot be a question only for our political leaders.

If Hobbes’s problems are real and his solutions only partly convincing, where will we
go? It might reasonably be thought that this is the central question of modern political
thought. We will have no doubt that peaceful coexistence is one of the greatest goods of
human life, something worth many inconveniences, sacrifices and compromises. We will
see that there is moral force behind the laws and requirements of the state, simply
because human beings do indeed need authority and systems of enforcement if they are
to cooperate peacefully. But we can hardly accept that, because human judgment is weak
and faulty, that there can be only one judge of these matters—precisely because that
judge might turn out to be very faulty indeed. Our concern will be how we can effectively
divide power between government and people, while still ensuring that important
questions of moral and political judgment are peacefully adjudicated. We will be
concerned with the standards and institutions that provide for compromise between
many different and conflicting judgments. And all the time, we will remember Hobbes’s
reminder that human life is never without inconvenience and troubles, that we must live
with a certain amount of bad, to prevent the worst: fear of violence, and violent death.