Hobbes' Leviathan: The Monster That Keeps Us SafeLink Copied

Imagine the power goes out. Not for an hour, but permanently. No police. No courts. No government. No one to call when someone breaks into your house. How long before your neighbors become threats? How long before you start thinking about weapons, alliances, preemptive strikes against anyone who might strike first?

Thomas Hobbes believed he knew the answer: not long at all. Strip away the thin veneer of civilization, and you'll find a war of every person against every other, a world where life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." This isn't pessimism, he would say. It's realism. The only escape is to surrender our natural freedom to an absolute sovereign, a Leviathan powerful enough to terrify us all into peace.

Published in 1651 during the English Civil War, Leviathan remains one of the most unsettling and influential works in political philosophy. It asks questions we prefer not to think about: What prevents society from collapsing into violence? What do we really owe each other? What price are we willing to pay for security?

Hobbes wrote from experience. The English Civil War (1642–1651) had torn his country apart. King and Parliament waged bloody campaigns. Neighbors killed neighbors over questions of sovereignty and religion. The old certainties (divine right, traditional authority, the natural order of things) lay shattered. Hobbes watched competing factions, each claiming legitimacy, produce only chaos and death.

This was no abstract philosophical problem. Hobbes fled to Paris in 1640, fearing for his life. He wrote Leviathan as an exile, trying to understand how political order could be rebuilt from the ruins. The question wasn't academic: What would it take to end the killing?

Hobbes was responding to the dominant political theories of his time. Traditional thinkers grounded political authority in divine right: kings ruled because God ordained it. But which king? The war featured competing claims to divine sanction. Others appealed to natural law and ancient constitutions. But these too proved contested. Every faction found texts and traditions to justify its cause.

Hobbes wanted to start over. He would build political philosophy on foundations that couldn't be disputed: human nature itself. Not human nature as theologians imagined it (corrupted by original sin, redeemable through grace), but human nature as a scientist might observe it. What are humans actually like? What do they actually want? From these facts, Hobbes would derive the only possible basis for legitimate political authority.

This is more radical than it first appears. Hobbes isn't saying government is useful or beneficial. He's saying it's necessary for human life above the level of beasts. Without the sovereign's sword, there is no property, no justice, no society, no arts, no letters. There is only fear and the continual danger of violent death. The state doesn't exist to make us virtuous or to realize some vision of the good life. It exists to keep us from killing each other.

The state of nature is Hobbes' most famous and most misunderstood concept. He's not claiming humans are inherently evil or bloodthirsty. He's making a structural argument. Given three facts about human nature (rough equality, scarcity of resources, and uncertainty about others' intentions), conflict becomes highly likely without a power to enforce agreements.

Start with rough equality. Hobbes observes that even the weakest person can kill the strongest through cunning, alliance, or surprise. No one is so powerful they can afford to ignore others. This equality makes everyone a potential threat.

Add scarcity. There isn't enough of everything for everyone. When two people want the same thing and can't both have it, they become enemies. Competition for resources drives conflict.

Finally, add uncertainty. Even if you're peaceful, you can't be sure your neighbor is. Since the stakes are life and death, it's rational to strike first rather than wait to be struck. This creates a spiral: your defensive preparation looks like aggression to others, prompting their defensive preparations, which look like aggression to you.

"And from this diffidence of one another, there is no way for any man to secure himself so reasonable as anticipation; that is, by force, or wiles, to master the persons of all men he can, so long, till he see no other power great enough to endanger him."

The result is war. Not necessarily constant fighting, but the constant readiness to fight. Peace requires trust, and trust requires enforcement. Without enforcement, trust becomes irrational.

Hobbes distinguishes right from law. Right is liberty, the absence of external impediments. Law is obligation, a rule that binds. In the state of nature, everyone has a right to everything, which effectively means no one has a right to anything. Your "right" to something means nothing if anyone else can take it.

Natural law, for Hobbes, isn't divine command or cosmic moral order. It's what reason discovers about the conditions for survival. The first law of nature: seek peace, because peace is necessary for self-preservation. The second: be willing to give up your right to all things when others do likewise, because mutual restraint makes peace possible. The third: keep your covenants, because without trust, cooperation collapses.

But here's the problem. Natural law is binding in conscience (you should follow it), but not in practice. In the state of nature, keeping your word when others might not is suicidal. The laws of nature require enforcement to be effective. Enter the sovereign.

The sovereign's power must be absolute, Hobbes argues, because any limitation recreates the problem it was meant to solve. If the sovereign can be resisted when subjects judge they've exceeded their authority, then subjects are judging. That means there's no common judge. And that means we're back in the state of nature. The whole point is to create an authority whose judgments are final.

This doesn't mean the sovereign can do anything without consequence. Hobbes distinguishes power from right. The sovereign has absolute power but should use it for the subjects' good. A sovereign who makes subjects' lives worse than the state of nature has failed. But subjects cannot resist even a bad sovereign without recreating the war of all against all. The remedy for tyranny, Hobbes believed, is worse than the disease.

Hobbes constructs his argument with geometric precision, moving from human nature to the necessity of absolute sovereignty.

He begins with psychology. Humans are matter in motion, driven by appetites and aversions. We seek pleasure and flee pain. What we call "good" is simply what we desire; "evil" is what we avoid. There's no objective good independent of human desire. This psychological egoism underlies everything that follows.

From psychology, Hobbes derives the state of nature. Without common power, humans pursue their desires without limit. Conflict becomes likely. The state of nature is a state of war.

From the misery of the state of nature, reason discovers the laws of nature: seek peace, be willing to covenant, keep your word. But these laws are ineffective without enforcement.

Therefore, humans must covenant together to create a sovereign. Each person agrees with every other to surrender their natural right to all things to a common power.

"I authorize and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition: that you give up your right to him, and authorize all his actions in like manner."

Notice the structure. The covenant is between subjects, not between subjects and sovereign. The sovereign is created by the covenant but is not party to it. This means the sovereign cannot breach the covenant (you can't breach an agreement you never made). And subjects cannot claim the sovereign violated their rights, because they authorized all the sovereign's actions in advance.

The result is Leviathan: an "artificial man" composed of all the natural persons who created it. The sovereign is its soul, giving life and motion to the whole. The magistrates are its joints. The laws are its nerves. The wealth of citizens is its strength. The people's safety is its business.

"This is the generation of that great Leviathan, or rather, to speak more reverently, of that mortal god, to which we owe under the immortal God, our peace and defence."

Consider international relations. Between nations, there is no common power. Each state exists in something like Hobbes' state of nature relative to others. Treaties are kept when convenient and broken when not. Military power determines outcomes. Alliances shift based on interest. The United Nations can recommend and condemn but cannot enforce. This is why Hobbes believed perpetual peace between nations was impossible without a world sovereign, a conclusion that many international relations theorists still find compelling.

Or consider a failed state. When central authority collapses, as in Somalia during the 1990s or Libya after 2011, Hobbesian dynamics emerge. Warlords carve out territories. Clans arm themselves. Commerce becomes dangerous. Life expectancy plummets. People flee or submit to whoever can provide protection. The absence of Leviathan doesn't produce freedom. It produces something closer to the war of all against all.

Even within functioning states, Hobbesian logic operates at the margins. Prison populations, lacking reliable protection from authorities, form gangs for security. In neighborhoods where police are absent or mistrusted, informal power structures emerge. During natural disasters, looting sometimes begins within hours. The veneer of civilization may be thinner than we like to imagine.

Consider also nuclear deterrence. During the Cold War, the United States and Soviet Union existed in a state of nature relative to each other. Each had the power to destroy the other. Trust was difficult. The solution was Mutually Assured Destruction: make the consequences of a first strike so catastrophic that neither side would risk it. This is Hobbesian reasoning applied to geopolitics. Peace through terror. The sovereign's sword, scaled up to planetary annihilation.

Objection: Hobbes' psychology is too cynical. Humans are capable of genuine altruism, cooperation, and moral motivation.

Hobbes would likely respond that he's not denying humans can be kind, generous, or principled. He's asking what happens when these virtues aren't backed by enforcement. Kind people get exploited. Generous people get taken advantage of. Principled people get killed by the unprincipled. In the state of nature, nice guys finish last, or don't finish at all. Morality requires a framework where moral behavior isn't suicidal. That framework is the state.

Modern research complicates this picture. Evolutionary psychology suggests humans have genuine prosocial instincts: empathy, fairness, in-group loyalty. Anthropological evidence shows many small-scale societies maintain order without states. But Hobbes might note that these societies are small, face common external threats, and enforce norms through reputation and ostracism. These mechanisms don't scale easily to large, anonymous, diverse populations. The question isn't whether humans can cooperate but whether they can cooperate reliably at scale without enforcement.

Objection: Absolute sovereignty is a recipe for tyranny. Hobbes gives the sovereign unlimited power to oppress.

Hobbes acknowledged that sovereigns can abuse their power. But he insisted the alternative is worse. A bad sovereign might make you miserable. The state of nature will make you dead. Any mechanism for restraining the sovereign (constitutions, rights, separation of powers) creates competing authorities whose conflicts can collapse into civil war. Better one tyrant than many, he concluded.

This response is less convincing after centuries of constitutional government. Liberal democracies have developed mechanisms for limiting power without (usually) collapsing into anarchy. Separation of powers, judicial review, federalism, and regular elections create checks on authority while maintaining order. Hobbes would likely see these as unstable compromises that work only because deeper social consensus prevents the conflicts they're designed to manage. When that consensus breaks down, as it did in his England, the constitutional machinery fails. Whether he's right remains debated.

Objection: The social contract is a fiction. No one actually consented to be governed.

Hobbes distinguishes explicit from tacit consent. Explicit consent occurs when people actually covenant to create a sovereign. Tacit consent occurs when people accept the protection of an existing sovereign. By living under a government's protection, you implicitly agree to its authority. You can always leave for the state of nature, but you won't, because it's terrible.

This move is philosophically controversial. Critics argue that tacit consent is no consent at all. You didn't choose to be born under a particular government. The "option" to leave for the state of nature is no real option. But Hobbes might reply that the question isn't whether you chose this particular government but whether you prefer any government to none. Given the alternative, rational persons would consent to almost any sovereign. The legitimacy of authority rests not on historical consent but on rational necessity. Many philosophers find this response unsatisfying, but it has proven difficult to refute entirely.

Objection: Hobbes ignores the social bonds (family, community, religion) that hold society together without state coercion.

This is a serious challenge. Hobbes treats humans as isolated individuals who must be forced into cooperation. But humans are born into families, raised in communities, shaped by traditions. These bonds precede and often outweigh state authority. Many societies have maintained order through kinship, custom, and religion without anything like a Hobbesian sovereign.

Hobbes might respond that these mechanisms work in small, homogeneous communities but fail at scale. When communities with different customs, religions, and kinship structures must coexist, their bonds become sources of conflict rather than cooperation. The English Civil War was partly a religious war. Hobbes saw firsthand how community bonds can tear society apart. The sovereign must stand above all particular communities, commanding the loyalty that none of them can command from all. Yet critics note that this response may underestimate how much social order depends on bonds that states cannot create and can only destroy.

Security and Freedom

Every debate about security versus liberty replays Hobbesian themes. How much surveillance is acceptable to prevent terrorism? How much police power is necessary to maintain order? How much freedom should we sacrifice for safety? Hobbes' answer is clear: as much as necessary. Security is the precondition for all other goods. Without it, freedom is meaningless.

This logic pervades modern governance. Airport security, mass surveillance, emergency powers, militarized police: all justified by the need to protect citizens from threats. Critics invoke rights and liberties. Defenders invoke Hobbes: your rights mean nothing if you're dead. The debate rarely resolves because both sides have a point. Hobbes helps us see the genuine trade-off rather than pretending we can have unlimited freedom and perfect security simultaneously.

Technology and New Leviathans

Digital platforms exercise something like sovereign power over their domains. Meta, Google, and Amazon make rules, enforce them, and punish violators. Their terms of service function as law. Their moderation decisions determine who can speak and who is silenced. Their algorithms shape what billions of people see, think, and buy.

Hobbes might recognize these as private Leviathans: powers that maintain order within their territories through a combination of incentive and coercion. Unlike states, they lack democratic legitimacy. Unlike the state of nature, they provide genuine benefits. The question is whether we want to live under corporate sovereigns whose interests may not align with ours, and what alternative arrangements might be possible.

Artificial intelligence raises even more profound questions. As AI systems become more capable, they increasingly make decisions that affect human lives: who gets loans, who gets jobs, who gets parole, what news we see. These systems operate according to rules humans may not understand and cannot easily challenge. Hobbes would ask: who is sovereign here? If no one controls the algorithms, we may be entering a new kind of state of nature. Not a war of humans against humans, but a world where inhuman systems shape human fate without accountability. This framing may be imperfect, but it captures something important about the governance challenges these technologies pose.

The Fragility of Order

Perhaps Hobbes' deepest relevance is his reminder that civilization is fragile. We take for granted the order that makes ordinary life possible: the expectation that strangers won't attack us, that agreements will be honored, that tomorrow will resemble today. But this order rests on foundations that can crumble.

Climate change, pandemic disease, economic collapse, political polarization: any of these could stress social order to the breaking point. When people lose faith that the system serves them, when institutions lose legitimacy, when the sovereign fails to provide security, Hobbesian dynamics can reemerge. The veneer cracks. The war of all against all waits beneath.

This isn't an argument for complacency about injustice. It's an argument for taking seriously what we risk when we destabilize existing order without a clear path to something better. Revolutionary movements have often discovered that destroying Leviathan is easier than building a new one, and that the interval between them can be hell.

Psychology and Self-Knowledge

Hobbes also offers a mirror for self-examination. His account of human nature is unflattering but not implausible. We are driven by desires we didn't choose. We rationalize self-interest as principle. We fear death and seek power. We trust others only when we must and betray them when we can.

This isn't the whole truth about human nature, but it's part of the truth. Acknowledging our Hobbesian tendencies (the fear, the competitiveness, the capacity for violence) is the beginning of wisdom. We can't transcend what we won't face. Building institutions that channel these tendencies productively requires understanding them honestly.

Hobbes' influence on subsequent political thought is immense, though often through opposition. John Locke wrote his Two Treatises of Government partly to refute Hobbes, arguing that the state of nature was not war but inconvenience, that natural rights limit sovereign power, and that governments violating these rights may be legitimately resisted. The entire liberal tradition can be read as an attempt to preserve Hobbes' insight about the necessity of political authority while rejecting his conclusion about its absoluteness.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau took a different approach. He argued that Hobbes had described not natural humanity but humanity corrupted by civilization. The competitive, fearful, isolated individuals of Hobbes' state of nature are products of social development, not its starting point. True human nature is gentle and sociable. The problem isn't the absence of Leviathan but the presence of inequality and dependence.

Carl Schmitt, the controversial twentieth-century theorist, embraced Hobbes' darkest implications. Politics, Schmitt argued, is fundamentally about the distinction between friend and enemy. The sovereign is whoever decides the exception, who suspends normal rules in emergencies. Liberal constitutionalism is an illusion; beneath it lies the Hobbesian reality of power and decision. Schmitt's reading remains influential, though his association with Nazism has rightly made many wary of his conclusions.

Contemporary political realism in international relations draws heavily on Hobbes. Thinkers like Hans Morgenthau and Kenneth Waltz analyze international politics as a state of nature where states pursue power and security without overarching authority. The "anarchic" international system produces conflict regardless of states' internal character. Peace is a temporary equilibrium of power, not a stable condition.

Even critics of Hobbes work within frameworks he established. The social contract tradition (from Locke through Rousseau to Rawls) accepts that political legitimacy must be grounded in some form of agreement or consent, even while rejecting Hobbes' specific conclusions. The question "why should I obey the state?" remains central to political philosophy. Hobbes' answer (because the alternative is worse) remains one of the most powerful on offer.

• Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651). The primary text, available in many editions. The Penguin Classics edition with C.B. Macpherson's introduction provides helpful context. Parts I and II contain the core argument; Parts III and IV on religion can be skimmed.

• Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (2008). A leading intellectual historian situates Hobbes in his context, showing how he was responding to republican theories of freedom.

• Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (2002). Scholarly essays illuminating Hobbes' biography, intellectual development, and reception. Essential for understanding the man behind the argument.

• David Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan (1969). A rigorous reconstruction of Hobbes' argument, showing its internal coherence and ongoing relevance to rational choice theory.

• Sharon Lloyd, Morality in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (2009). Challenges the standard reading of Hobbes as a pure egoist, revealing a more complex moral psychology underlying his political theory.