Impact: Leviathan

The Man Who Fled Twice

Thomas Hobbes was born prematurely in 1588, reportedly because his mother went into early labor when she heard the Spanish Armada was approaching the English coast. He liked to say that fear and he were born twins. Whether or not the story is true, it tells you something about the man: Hobbes had a sharp sense of his own biography and knew how to use it.

He spent decades as a tutor and intellectual companion to the Cavendish family, traveling through Europe and meeting Galileo in Florence, corresponding with Descartes, absorbing the new mechanical philosophy that was transforming science. When the English Civil War began heating up in the early 1640s, Hobbes — a royalist by instinct — fled to Paris, where he eventually tutored the future Charles II in mathematics. He wrote Leviathan in Paris. Then, when it was published and its arguments managed to offend virtually everyone, including the royalist exiles who thought he'd undermined the divine right of kings, Hobbes fled back to England, gambling that Oliver Cromwell's government would be more tolerant of him than the French court. He was sixty-three years old. He lived to ninety-one, arguing vigorously until nearly the end.

What the Book Actually Does

Leviathan is organized in four parts, and most people who cite it have only read the first two. That's understandable — Parts III and IV are dense theological arguments about Scripture and the Kingdom of God that were, in their time, as explosive as the political theory. But the architecture of the whole matters. Hobbes wasn't separating politics from religion; he was trying to subordinate both to a single rational framework, which is part of what made everyone so angry.

The book opens, unexpectedly, with epistemology. Before Hobbes will tell you anything about the state, he tells you how human beings perceive and think. The opening chapter on sense is almost startlingly modern — Hobbes argues that what we call perception is nothing more than the motion of external objects pressing on our sense organs, producing motions in the nerves and brain, which we then experience as light, sound, color, taste. 'The object is one thing,' he writes, 'the image or fancy is another.' There is no mystical species or Aristotelian form traveling from the object to the eye, as university philosophy still taught — just matter in motion. This wasn't idle scene-setting. Hobbes was clearing the ground. If all human thought begins in sensation, and sensation is just mechanics, then human beings are, at bottom, physical machines. Everything that follows — desire, fear, reason, society, the state — is built on that foundation.

From this materialist account of the mind, Hobbes derives his famous account of the state of nature: a condition of equality so thoroughgoing that even the weakest can kill the strongest, of perpetual competition for scarce goods, of a war of every man against every man. In that condition there is no justice, no injustice, no mine or thine — only force and fraud. The social contract that gets us out of it requires surrendering our natural freedom to a sovereign powerful enough to enforce peace. Not a nice sovereign. Not a constitutional sovereign. A sovereign with near-absolute power, because any limit on that power reintroduces the possibility of conflict.

A Scandal on Arrival

When Leviathan appeared in London in 1651, it caused immediate uproar from contradictory directions. Royalists felt betrayed because Hobbes had grounded sovereignty not in God's will or hereditary right but in a contract — which implied that if a king lost effective power, as Charles I demonstrably had, his subjects' obligation to obey him expired. That was cold comfort to exiled Cavaliers. Meanwhile, republicans and parliamentarians distrusted Hobbes because his sovereign sounded like a tyrant, and Presbyterians and Anglicans alike were horrified by his treatment of Scripture and organized religion as instruments of political authority.

The book was formally condemned by the House of Commons in 1666, after the Great Fire of London, when Parliament was investigating whether God might be punishing England for tolerating atheism and blasphemy — and Leviathan was one of the texts named. Hobbes, then nearly eighty, reportedly burned several of his papers in fear. He was never prosecuted, partly because he had powerful friends and partly because he was too famous to touch without embarrassment. But he was prohibited from publishing anything further on political or religious subjects in England. He spent his last years translating Homer.

How It Became the Foundation

Despite — or because of — all the scandal, Leviathan could not be unread. John Locke wrote his own Two Treatises of Government largely in response to Hobbes, arguing for a more limited social contract and natural rights that no sovereign could revoke. Rousseau engaged with the state of nature argument and arrived at entirely different conclusions. Kant, Hegel, Marx — the entire tradition of modern political philosophy is, in a real sense, a running argument with the positions Hobbes staked out. You cannot understand liberalism without understanding what it was reacting against.

The twentieth century rediscovered Hobbes with particular intensity. After two world wars, the Holocaust, and the long fear of nuclear annihilation, the idea that human beings will tear each other apart without the restraining force of political order felt less like cynicism and more like empirical fact. John Rawls, whose A Theory of Justice (1971) defined Anglo-American political philosophy for a generation, used the device of a thought experiment about the original conditions of society — a direct descendant of Hobbes's state of nature. Game theorists recognized in Hobbes's prisoner's-dilemma logic a precursor of their own models of strategic behavior. The book had become a permanent fixture.

The Leviathan in the Room

The title image is one of the most famous in the history of book design. The frontispiece engraving shows a giant crowned figure rising above a landscape of towns and fields. Look closely: the giant's body is made up of hundreds of tiny human figures, all facing inward toward the sovereign's head. Below, in two columns, are the instruments of civil power on one side and ecclesiastical power on the other — castles and cannons, churches and thunderbolts. The image is the argument in visual form. The state is the people, composed into a single artificial body. The Leviathan of the title is the biblical sea-monster from the Book of Job — a creature of overwhelming power that only God can challenge.

That image has never stopped circulating. Political scientists use it in textbooks. Artists reference it. In 2012, the Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev made a film called Leviathan about the crushing power of the Russian state over an ordinary citizen — it won the Cannes prize for best screenplay and was nominated for an Academy Award. The concept of the Leviathan state, the artificial person that devours and incorporates its citizens, turns up in critiques of surveillance capitalism, of authoritarian populism, of the administrative state. Hobbes handed Western civilization a metaphor that refuses to date.

Why It Still Bites

The easiest way to dismiss Leviathan is to say that Hobbes was a defender of authoritarianism, and leave it there. The more honest response is to sit with the question he actually poses: if human beings left to their own devices will reliably produce conflict, what are we willing to give up for safety? That question has not become easier. Every debate about civil liberties versus national security, about the scope of state power during a pandemic, about whether democracies can hold together under pressure from demagogues — these are all, at some level, Hobbesian debates.

There is also something clarifying about Hobbes's refusal of sentiment. He does not pretend that people are naturally good, or that political institutions express some noble human essence. He starts with fear and self-interest and builds from there. The resulting theory is brutal and probably wrong in many of its details — but it has the advantage of starting from human beings as they actually behave rather than as we wish they would. That makes Leviathan one of those rare philosophical texts that feels less abstract the more troubled the times are.

And it is, in stretches, a genuinely strange and arresting read. The opening chapters on sense and imagination — where Hobbes argues that all human thought is ultimately just fancy, the residue of sensory pressure, and that the schoolmen who fill university lecture halls with words like 'intelligible species' are producing nothing but, in his withering phrase, 'insignificant speech' — these read less like seventeenth-century political theory and more like a cold dispatch from a man who has decided to take nothing on faith and see where that leaves him. It leaves him, as it turns out, with the Leviathan. Which is either a counsel of despair or the most realistic political theory ever written, depending on what you think human beings are.

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