Renodus

Leviathan

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Leviathan (1651)

Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil is Thomas Hobbes’s long argument that political authority is a human construction built out of fear, that the state of nature is unlivable, and that the only protection against the war of all against all is to surrender a great deal of freedom to a single sovereign who can enforce the peace. The book was published in 1651, in the aftermath of the English Civil War, which is to say that Hobbes was writing about anarchy with fresh empirical evidence in the street.

The title is a reference to Job 41 — the Leviathan is the sea-monster God shows Job as proof that some things in creation are so overwhelming that the question of their justice no longer makes sense. Hobbes takes the image and secularizes it. The state is a mortal god, a vast artificial body whose soul is sovereignty, whose nerves are laws, and whose power is assembled from the surrendered wills of its citizens. The famous frontispiece shows a crowned giant made of hundreds of tiny figures, looming over the landscape, holding a sword and a crozier. That image is Hobbes’s argument in a single picture: the state is literally the people, composed into a single fearsome body, so that they can live.

The Core Argument

The state of nature. Hobbes starts with a thought experiment: strip away every institution, every custom, every enforceable norm, and ask what human beings do. His answer is in one of the most-quoted passages in political philosophy: in the state of nature, human life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Everyone is roughly equal in the sense that even the weakest can kill the strongest with enough cunning. Everyone is afraid of everyone else. Cooperation is impossible because no contract can be enforced. There is no industry, no agriculture, no arts, no letters — only the continual war of every man against every man.

This is not anthropology. Hobbes is not claiming that historical people lived this way. He is claiming that this is what we would be if the institutional scaffolding of civil society dissolved. The evidence, for him, was the civil war he had just survived.

The contract. The way out of the state of nature is not virtue, not reason, not cooperation — those are the things that cannot be built when there is no enforcement. The way out is a single collective act: every person surrenders their right of self-rule to a common power, on the condition that every other person does the same. The sovereign is the recipient of the transfer. Once the sovereign exists, the sovereign’s law is the condition for everything else — for property, for agreement, for morality as an operative category.

The sovereign is indivisible. Hobbes’s most controversial move is that the sovereign cannot be limited, cannot be checked, and cannot be deposed by the same contract that created them. If the sovereign could be overruled by the people, there would be no sovereign; the state of nature would leak back in. This is why Hobbes is often read as an absolutist. He is — but the absolutism has a specific logic. It is not built on a theory of divine right or of hereditary privilege. It is built on a theory of what happens when authority is divided: the division itself causes civil war, and civil war causes the state of nature, and the state of nature is unlivable.

Morality is downstream of the state. Right and wrong, just and unjust, are not natural kinds for Hobbes. They are categories that exist only when a sovereign has established law. In the state of nature, nothing is unjust, because there is no law. Once the state exists, injustice is the breaking of the contract. Morality, in other words, is a political artifact, not a metaphysical one. This is one of the deepest foundations of modern political philosophy: Hobbes has taken the question of authority and made it an engineering problem rather than a theological one.

The Strange Position of the Book

Leviathan is a book nearly everyone argues with. Rousseau argues that Hobbes has mistaken corrupted civilized man for natural man and that the state of nature is actually peaceful. Locke argues that Hobbes gives the sovereign too much, and that there is a right of revolution when the sovereign breaks trust. Nietzsche argues that Hobbes has demystified morality correctly but then flinched from the consequences by reinstalling the sovereign as a new mystification. Carl Schmitt argues that Hobbes was right about sovereignty and should be read as the founder of a hard-realist political science.

What survives all of these arguments is the equipment Hobbes built. The vocabulary of state of nature, social contract, sovereign authority, and mortal god is Hobbes’s, and we still use it whether we agree with him or not. That is the usual test of a foundational work: the argument it opens cannot be reached any other way.

Leviathan as an Archetype

The book has become a symbol as well as a work of philosophy. When a contemporary dystopia builds a sealed society under a totalizing authority that claims to protect its citizens from some unsurvivable outside, it is usually reworking the Hobbesian contract. The Inquisitor’s claim — that human beings cannot bear freedom — is the soft version of Hobbes’s claim that human beings cannot survive without a sovereign. The connective tissue runs directly from Hobbes to Dostoevsky to the twentieth-century totalitarian state to the twenty-first-century corporate enclave.

In [[silo|Silo]]: the citizens of the underground silo have entered an irrevocable pact. They have traded freedom — the freedom to walk outside, the freedom to read their own history, the freedom to elect their own leaders — for protection from a state of nature (a toxic surface) that the sovereign (the IT department, the “Founders”) represents to them as unsurvivable. The silo is Leviathan with the frontispiece reversed: the giant artificial body is below ground, and the state of nature has been relocated from the war of all against all to the surface of the earth itself. The critical question the show keeps asking is one Hobbes would have recognized: what if the sovereign has lied about the state of nature in order to make the contract look necessary?

In [[fallout|Fallout]]: the Wasteland is Hobbes’s state of nature literalized — solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, short. The vaults are the social contracts offered by Vault-Tec: surrender your autonomy, enter the vault, accept engineered happiness, and we will protect you from the Wasteland. The twist — Hobbes’s nightmare scenario — is that the sovereign manufactured the state of nature in order to sell the contract. The nuclear war was an elite strategy. The vaults are the product the war was designed to create demand for. Fallout is Hobbes with a marketing department.

In [[nineteen-eighty-four|1984]]: the Party’s legitimacy rests on the claim that without it, Oceania would be destroyed by the other superpowers, by internal traitors, by Goldstein’s conspiracy. The state of nature is the perpetual war, which — by the book’s inner logic — is almost certainly fabricated by the Party itself. Hobbes’s sovereign has become a hall of mirrors.

In The Grand Inquisitor: Dostoevsky gives the religious version of Hobbes’s argument. The Inquisitor says human beings cannot bear freedom; the Church has therefore taken freedom from them, in exchange for bread, mystery, and authority. Hobbes says human beings cannot bear the state of nature; the state has therefore taken their freedom, in exchange for law, peace, and survival. The logic is the same. The loss is the same. Whether the trade is worth it is the question neither Hobbes nor Dostoevsky fully resolves.

Lineage

Predecessors:

  • Plato, Republic (c. 380 BCE) — the first sustained argument that political justice requires a structured hierarchy of authority, and that a well-ordered polity is a human construction, not a natural growth
  • Machiavelli, The Prince (1513, published 1532) — the secularization of political authority; the state as an engineering problem, detached from divine sanction
  • Thucydides’s Melian Dialogue (c. 400 BCE) — Hobbes translated Thucydides into English in 1629; the Melian argument that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” is the realist core Hobbes builds on

Successors:

  • John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689) — the liberal reply: the sovereign is accountable, the contract is revocable, there is a right of revolution
  • Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762) — the romantic reply: the state of nature is innocent, civilization is what corrupts us, the contract must be grounded in the general will, not fear
  • Kant, Perpetual Peace (1795) — the cosmopolitan extension: the Hobbesian problem exists between states as well as within them, and requires a federation of republics to solve
  • Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (1932) — the twentieth-century hard-realist reclamation of Hobbes
  • Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) — the warning that the Hobbesian move, once pushed to total power, produces not peace but the death factory
  • Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975) — the poststructural reply: the sovereign in Hobbes’s visible form has been replaced by dispersed disciplinary power; the Leviathan has gone underground and become the panopticon

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