Leviathan

Overview

Leviathan is a geometry book about politics. Hobbes had visited Galileo, had read Euclid late and been converted by him, and he believed that if you defined your terms exactly and reasoned in order, moral and political conclusions would follow with the same force as theorems. So the book starts absurdly far back, with how sensation works, and does not reach the state until page two hundred. The long approach is the argument. By the time the sovereign appears you have already agreed to a picture of human beings as mechanisms driven by appetite and aversion, and the absolute state is the consequence.

It comes in four parts of very unequal interest to modern readers. Of Man, Of Commonwealth, Of a Christian Commonwealth, Of the Kingdom of Darkness. Most courses assign the first two and a chapter or two of the third. Skipping the second half entirely is a mistake, though, because the biblical parts are where Hobbes fights his real enemy: the claim that a priest, a presbytery or a pope has authority the civil power must respect. He had watched that claim help start a war.

The argument

Part one. Everything in the mind starts as motion in the sense organs. Imagination is decaying sense, and thought is a train of images guided by appetite. Reason is reckoning with names, so error comes from careless definitions. Human beings are roughly equal in ability, which is the problem rather than the solution: equal hope of getting what they want puts them in competition, and competition among equals with no referee produces three causes of quarrel, competition, diffidence and glory.

In that condition there is no injustice, because there is no law; no property, because nothing can be secured; and no culture, because nothing can be planned. Hobbes is careful that this is not an accusation of wickedness. Reasonable people acting reasonably arrive there. From it he derives the right of nature, each person’s liberty to use any means for self-preservation, and then the laws of nature: seek peace where you can, lay down that right if others will, keep the covenants you make.

Part two. The laws of nature bind in conscience but not in practice, since keeping them when others do not is suicide. So the escape has to be institutional. A multitude authorises one person, an individual or an assembly, to bear their common representation, each covenanting with the others and none with the sovereign. This has consequences Hobbes drives home without flinching. The sovereign cannot breach the contract, because it is not a party to it. It cannot justly be punished or deposed. It decides doctrine, property law, the limits of speech, and what counts as a just war. Dividing its powers, or setting law above it, only rebuilds the conditions for civil war.

Two things the sovereign cannot do. It cannot command a subject to kill himself or to refrain from defending his own life, because that was the whole reason for the covenant. And when it can no longer protect, obedience ends. Hobbes’s absolutism has a trapdoor in the floor, and a defeated royalist reading the 1651 text would have noticed exactly where it was.

Parts three and four argue that Scripture, properly read, gives no earthly kingdom to the church, that prophecy has ceased, that miracles have stopped, and that the doctrines of a separate spiritual jurisdiction, of purgatory and of the immortal soul as a governing power have been used to frighten people into obeying the wrong master.

How to read it

Read the Introduction, then chapters 6, 11, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 21, 26 and 29, then the Review and Conclusion. That is the spine. Chapter 46, on the abuse of Aristotle and the universities, is the funniest thing in the book if you have time.

Keep the definitions. Hobbes uses ordinary words in stipulated senses, and most objections to him are really objections to his vocabulary. Liberty, right, law, person, author and justice all mean something narrower than you expect, and he tells you what in advance.

The common misreading is that Hobbes thinks people are evil. He does not. He thinks they are afraid, vain and rational, which is worse, because it means the war of all against all is not a moral failure but an equilibrium.

Do not read chapter 13 as anthropology. Hobbes offers it as what follows from his premises, and his own examples, the American nations, civil war, the way we lock our doors, are evidence of the tendency rather than reports of a lost age.

Questions it raises

• If nobody can keep a covenant without a sovereign, how does the covenant that creates the sovereign get made?
• Hobbes says subjects author everything the sovereign does. Does that make the subject complicit in injustices done to him?
• Is a liberty that consists only in the silence of the law worth calling liberty?
• The duty to obey ends when protection ends. Does that make Hobbes a theorist of absolute power or of pure self-interest?
• Why does a book arguing for undivided civil power need four hundred pages about the Bible?
• Would Hobbes accept modern constitutional courts, or would he say they are sovereignty divided and therefore a slow-burning civil war?