- Length
- 736 pagesTuck, Leviathan, Cambridge, rev. student ed. 1996
- Reading
- DemandingReadable with attention; assumes no other book
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Leviathan
The first fully modern work of political philosophy: no appeal to scripture that a non-believer must accept, no natural hierarchy, no purpose built into the world. Hobbes starts from bodies in motion and reasons his way to an absolute sovereign, and nearly everyone since has been arguing with the route rather than dismissing it.
- Date
- 1651
- Author
- Thomas Hobbes
- Region
- Paris and London
- Language
- English
- 1668 Latin, Thomas Hobbes His own version, differing from the English in places Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Answered — Drew a named later reply, but was not itself a reply
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years to the reply
- 38 years
Attacked from every direction on publication, investigated by Parliament in 1666, and never out of print since; the founding text of the modern argument about political obligation.
What the book says
Four parts, arguing from what a human being is to what a state must be. Hobbes begins with sensation and motion: everything that exists is body, thought is motion in the brain, and what we call good and evil are names for what we happen to want and avoid. From there to the famous condition. Take away a common power to keep everyone in awe and people are roughly equal in strength and cunning, competing for the same scarce things, distrustful of each other and hungry for reputation - and the result is not occasional violence but a permanent state of war, in which nothing can be built or planted because nothing can be kept, and life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. There is no injustice there, because where there is no common power there is no law. The way out is a covenant: everyone lays down the right to all things at once, on condition that everyone else does, and authorises a sovereign to act in their name. That sovereign's power must be undivided and unlimited, because a divided sovereign is the war returning. The second half turns to the church, and argues at length that no religious authority can hold power against the civil one.
What it argues
That political authority is manufactured rather than found, and that it must be absolute to work. The argument is a construction: given roughly equal people with unlimited rights and no enforcer, no agreement can be relied on, because the first party to perform is at the mercy of the second. What breaks the deadlock is a simultaneous transfer of right to a person or assembly who is not party to the covenant and therefore cannot breach it. Hobbes then follows the logic without flinching. The sovereign cannot act unjustly toward subjects, since they authorised the acts; power divided between king and parliament is a civil war waiting; and religious authority must be subordinate, because two supreme powers in one commonwealth is the same problem again.
What answered it
Locke, at length and by implication throughout the Two Treatises. Filmer answered from the royalist side, arguing for patriarchal right. Rousseau took the state-of-nature method and produced an entirely different starting condition. The most enduring reply is Locke's, because it accepts the terms: if you are going to justify government by what people would agree to, then what they would agree to is not unlimited power over themselves. The argument between those two positions organises liberal political thought to this day.
How it argues
By construction from definitions, in imitation of geometry, which Hobbes had discovered late and with the enthusiasm of a convert. He sets out what he means by each term and builds, and the argument is meant to be as compelling as a proof. What makes the book readable rather than arid is the prose: he writes with a hard, plain, contemptuous energy that is unlike anyone else in English philosophy, and the famous passages are famous because they are well made rather than because they are central.
The moment
The English civil wars. Hobbes left for Paris in 1640 expecting trouble, and Leviathan was published two years after Charles I was executed - a decade in which the country had shown, in his view, exactly what happens when sovereignty is contested. He tutored the exiled Prince of Wales in mathematics, and then wrote a book that offended the royalists by grounding authority in consent rather than divine right, offended Parliament by defending absolutism, and offended the clergy by subordinating them. He returned to England in 1651 and made his peace with the new regime, which offended everyone again.
How it travelled
Notoriously. The book was denounced as atheist within months, Hobbes was investigated by a parliamentary committee in 1666 after the plague and the fire were blamed on national impiety, and Oxford burned copies in 1683. He was never prosecuted. Meanwhile the argument entered the bloodstream: the social contract, the state of nature, the problem of assurance and the analysis of sovereignty are Hobbesian equipment, used constantly by people who reject his conclusions.
The strongest objection
That the sovereign cannot be exempt from the analysis. Hobbes' whole case rests on people being self-interested and untrustworthy without an enforcer - and then he installs one person or assembly with unlimited power and no enforcer above them. Locke put it plainly: this is to think men so foolish that they take care to avoid the mischief of foxes and are content to be devoured by lions. Hobbes' answer, that a sovereign's interest is bound up with the prosperity of the subjects, is exactly the kind of reliance on good intentions the rest of the book refuses to allow anywhere else.
Why read it
For the thirteenth chapter, which is four pages and is the most famous passage in English political writing, and for the sixteenth on representation, which is the actual philosophical engine. The second half, on religion, is where most readers stop and is worth knowing about even unread - a third of the book is an argument about scripture, which tells you what the seventeenth century thought was at stake.
- First printed
- 1651
- First in English
- 1651
- Digitised
- Yes
The English of 1651 and the Latin of 1668 differ, and the Latin appendix contains material with no English counterpart. Malcolm's Clarendon edition of 2012 prints both.
Written in English; no translation issue. The 1651 text is public domain.
Where it stands
Live, and not only historically. Game theory rediscovered the assurance problem as the prisoner's dilemma; contractarian political philosophy from Rawls onward works with Hobbes' apparatus; and the argument about whether legitimate authority requires accountability or merely effectiveness is not settled anywhere.
The passage
the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.
Leviathan, part I chapter 13, in the 1651 English text. Public domain, and Hobbes' own words rather than a translator's.
Contested
Whether Hobbes was an atheist has been argued since his lifetime, with the theological chapters read both as sincere and as a demolition conducted in pious language. The English and Latin versions differ, and which represents his considered view on some points is unresolved. Whether the state of nature is meant as history, as anthropology or as an analytical device is disputed, though the last is now the usual reading. And whether his sovereign is a monarch by preference or by illustration - the text allows an assembly - matters for how absolutist the doctrine really is.