Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan

An introduction to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. Hobbes looms over all of us as the preeminent defender of the modern state and sovereign authority. Nuanced and original, he is probably the most influential figure in modern political philosophy who, and could be described as the father of both modern liberalism and modern conservatism.

Hobbes’ originality was his belief that political theory could be deduced from scientific principles about psychology, the senses, language, morality, knowledge, and power.

To understand politics, he argued, you had to understand people. Hobbes grounds Leviathan in a state of nature – a theoretical situation in which humans have no institutions, no government, no coercive power – a pre-societal condition.

Human existence in a state of nature is, according to Hobbes, pretty undesirable. In the most famous passage of Leviathan he says that in a state of nature there are ‘no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’

In a state of nature, we have a right to all things, but because we seek our own self-preservation, there are ‘laws of nature.’ Hobbes says that the first law of nature is ‘that every man seek 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.’

Because some ignore or misunderstand the laws of nature we require a sovereign power to keep us in awe; a leviathan.

Hobbes has been reinterpreted in the 20th century in game theory terms as a prisoner’s dilemma.

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Sources:

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

Thomas Hull, Hobbes and the Making of Modern Political Thought

Glen Newey, The Routledge Guidebook to Hobbes’ Leviathan

Martinich Aloysius, Hobbes

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hobbes-moral/

https://shadowstrike.medium.com/indian-traffic-a-prisoners-dilemma-366db464e732

Credits:

Galileo with his Telescope: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Astronomy;_Galileo_with_his_telescope_in_the_Piazza_San_Marc_Wellcome_V0024831.jpg, CC BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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