Leviathan
Thomas Hobbes (1651)
“Written in Paris exile during the English Civil War, Hobbes's 1651 masterwork argues that outside a sovereign power, life is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short' — and that peace requires an absolute commonwealth in which fearful individuals covenant away their natural right to everything in exchange for protection.”
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Leviathan
Thomas Hobbes (1651) · 700pages · 17th Century / English Civil War · 6 AP appearances
Summary
Leviathan argues that human beings in the state of nature — without a common power to overawe them — exist in a war of all against all, where life is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.' To escape this condition, individuals covenant with one another to alienate their natural rights (except self-preservation) to a sovereign, who becomes the 'mortal god' authorizing law, property, justice, and religion. Hobbes's materialist psychology, geometric method, and Erastian theology combine into the foundational modern argument that political authority is artificial, contractual, and grounded in fear rather than nature, grace, or tradition.
Why It Matters
Leviathan is the founding text of modern political philosophy. No earlier work grounded political authority so thoroughly in rational contract rather than divine right, natural hierarchy, or custom. No earlier work analyzed political obligation with comparable methodological rigor, deriving concl...
Themes & Motifs
Diction & Style
Register: High formal — consistent with seventeenth-century philosophical treatise tradition. Legal-technical vocabulary predominates ('covenant,' 'authority,' 'right,' 'justice') with frequent Latin terminology in parentheses anchoring English translations to Scholastic tradition.
Narrator: First-person authoritative, confident, argumentative. Hobbes writes as a philosopher who has discovered the correct m...
Figurative Language: Moderate but deployed for maximum effect. Hobbes is sparing with metaphor but uses it at strategic moments: commonwealth as body, sovereign as Mortall God, Papacy as ghost of Roman Empire, Scholasticism as Kingdome of Darknesse. His imagery is political and architectural rather than natural or lyrical.
Historical Context
Early Stuart England — the English Civil Wars (1642-1651) and the Commonwealth (1649-1660): Leviathan is not a book about the English Civil War, but every major philosophical claim bears the imprint of the war. The state of nature is a generalization of 1640s England: authority collapsed,...
Key Characters
Talking Points
- Hobbes's state of nature is described as 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.' Is this a historical claim about actual pre-civil existence, a description of what civil war reduces a society to, or a philosophical thought-experiment? Does the distinction matter for Hobbes's argument?
- Hobbes argues that the sovereign cannot commit injustice against subjects because subjects authorize all the sovereign's actions. Evaluate this argument. Is 'authorization' a convincing response to the charge that Hobbes's sovereign is unjustly absolute?
- Compare Hobbes's social contract with Locke's (Second Treatise, 1689) and Rousseau's (Social Contract, 1762). How do the three theories differ in who covenants with whom, what rights are alienated, and what powers the sovereign holds?
- Hobbes treats religion naturalistically in Chapter 12, explaining it as arising from fear of invisible powers. He simultaneously defends Christian doctrine in Part III. Are these positions compatible?
- The 1666 parliamentary investigation of Leviathan for atheism occurred during the Great Plague and Great Fire. What does this historical context reveal about the political function of heresy accusations in early modern England?
Notable Quotes
“For by Art is created that great Leviathan called a Common-Wealth, or State, (in latine Civitas) which is but an Artificiall Man; though of greater...”
“The Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; The Magistrates, and other Officers of Judicature and Executio...”
“And because the condition of Man, (as hath been declared in the precedent Chapter) is a condition of Warre of every one against every one; in which...”
Why Read This
Leviathan is the single most important text in the modern political-philosophy canon. Every subsequent theorist of political authority engages Hobbes explicitly or implicitly. Reading Leviathan directly gives students the conceptual apparatus — st...