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    Leviathan
    Leviathan
    Leviathan
    Ebook1,252 pages17 hours

    Leviathan

    By Thomas Hobbes

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    With an Introduction by Dr Richard Serjeantson, Trinity College, Cambridge

    Since its first publication in 1651, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan has been recognised as one of the most compelling, and most controversial, works of political philosophy written in English. Forged in the crucible of the civil and religious warfare of the mid-seventeenth century, it proposes a political theory that combines an unequivocal commitment to natural human liberty with the conviction that the sovereign power of government must be exercised absolutely. Leviathan begins from some shockingly naturalistic starting-points: an analysis of human nature as being motivated by vain-glory and pride, and a vision of religion as simply the fear of invisible powers made up by the mind. Yet from these deliberately unpromising elements, Hobbes constructs with unparalleled forcefulness an elaborate, systematic, and comprehensive account of how political society ought to be: ordered, law-bound, peaceful. In Leviathan, Hobbes presents us with a portrait of politics which depicts how a state that is made up of the unified body of all its citizens will be powerful, fruitful, protective of each of its members, and − above all − free from internal violence.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWordsworth Editions
    Release dateJul 15, 2015
    ISBN9781848706002
    Author

    Thomas Hobbes

    Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) floh 1640 nach Frankreich, nachdem er sich im Streit zwischen Krone und Parlament für die Rechte des Königs eingesetzt hatte. Sein Materialismus und seine harsche Kritik an der katholischen Kirche ließen ihn auch dort Verfolgung befürchten, so dass er 1651 nach England zurückkehrte und sich mit dem Cromwell-Regime arrangierte. Hobbes’ Staatsphilosophie, seine Erkenntnislehre und Psychologie sind von kaum zu überschätzendem Einfluss auf das Denken der nachfolgenden Zeit bis heute.

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    • 4/5
      Listened to this in audio form and found it a little hard to follow in places.
    • 3/5
      Vooral stuk over de mens is interessant: voor het eerst systematische ontleding van het menselijk functioneren, aanzet tot kennisleerStaatsleer: duidelijk absolutistisch, niet toevallig in parijs geschreven ten tijde van Louis XIV, wel op het einde lichte relativering. Natuurtoestand is goed als concept, maar te theoretisch om er een hele staatsleer uit te kunnen afleiden. Athe?sme: duidelijk niet, wel materialistische formulering met ruimte voor wonderen en god.
    • 4/5
      This is not an easy recreational read, but there is much to enjoy. Hobbes writing is wonderful - short and direct, he makes his arguments sing! Strong and opinionated - he must have been wonderful company in real life. But also an arch old conservative - we find him arguing in the end of Part 2 that the remedy for discontent with the political order is that the people should be taught to not want change!Parts of the book are just a joy to read - Chapter 13 on people living in a "state of nature", i.e. outside of a political commonwealth, is short, sharp and persuasive. This is also the source of the famous quote of life outside a commonwealth as "solitary, poor nasty, brutish and short". But in others he deploys his skills to argue for the indefensible: he suggests that the people have a covenant with their monarch, but not the other way round, and even, remarkably, that the people are authors of the actions of a monarch, and thus have no cause for complaint at any action taken by the monarch!I read an edition with current spelling, but I also referred to a text of the original. I found it amazing that the English in use in 1651 is so accessible today, whereas Shakespeare, from two generations earlier, is at times a struggle. Of course, one is written in academic terms while the other is vernacular, but it is striking how stable the language has become over 350 years.Read August 2014.
    • 5/5
      One of the best political treatises ever written. Very lucid arguments to justify an all-powerful state. I loved reading this book again.
    • 3/5
      Vooral stuk over de mens is interessant: voor het eerst systematische ontleding van het menselijk functioneren, aanzet tot kennisleerStaatsleer: duidelijk absolutistisch, niet toevallig in parijs geschreven ten tijde van Louis XIV, wel op het einde lichte relativering. Natuurtoestand is goed als concept, maar te theoretisch om er een hele staatsleer uit te kunnen afleiden. Atheïsme: duidelijk niet, wel materialistische formulering met ruimte voor wonderen en god.
    • 3/5
      In the 1640s, Europe was littered with wars, most of them pertinent to who ought to be in charge. The continent saw the last decade of the Thirty Years’ War, whose major impacts were reaffirming state sovereignty and killing an unprecedented number of people. Britain was itself embroiled in an on-and-off civil war, intending to settle a more philosophical debate over whether the king was answerable to parliament or vice versa; a substantial number of Britons died in the process. It was with this background that Thomas Hobbes, a royalist safely living in Paris, wrote his seminal work Leviathan.Named for a (presumably) mythical sea beast, the work considers the nature of man, the state, their interactions with faith, and knowledge. Human thought, he argues, comes in several flavours: Sense, Imagination (or, decaying sense), Reason, and Science. People combine these in order that they might “obtain some future apparent good,” and he describes a variety of acts that build (or destroy) honour, and therefore reputation, and therefore power in people; and people seek power ad infinitum. There’s just one problem with that desire: the natural condition is one of perpetual war of all versus all; referencing Thucydides, he believes that life on its own is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Therefore, sensing that to be unpleasant, peoples came together to create a “commonwealth,” which can (through fear of punishment) compel good behaviour – acquiescence to the laws of nature, adherence to contracts, etc. Considering three varieties of commonwealth – Monarchy, Democracy, and Aristocracy – he finds the former alone has the capacity to make conclusive, learned, reasoned, decisions; and therefore despite its “inconveniences” is far superior.To a large extent, however, this ‘finding’ isn’t so much reasoned as empirical; nearly any observer, in the same context, would have come to the same conclusion. Not only was the entire known world governed by a monarch of one form or another, but historical attempts to create either democratic or aristocratic governments had all met failure. Famously, democratic Athens was conquered by monarchic Sparta; the Roman Republic dissolved into the Roman Empire. As Hobbes was writing, the Polish sejm (an aristocratic assembly) had become so ineffective that Poland was conquered by its neighbours. And, most immediately to Hobbes, the English Parliament, having won the civil war, was disintegrating in to factionalism.One would be remiss, however, to overlook one additional factor: His exile notwithstanding, Hobbes was on the king’s payroll in the 1640s, and worked directly with the future King Charles II. His salary beholden to a strong believer in the divine right of kings, any argument against monarchical supremacy – especially in light of the parliamentary uprising – could come with dire economic consequences. “Taking of the sword out of the hand of the sovereign” is “contrary to the peace and safety of the people.” Yet in the centuries since, it’s been shown that assemblies – whether of the entire population or a subset of it – can govern effectively and sustainably. Less than a decade after Hobbes’ death, the Glorious Revolution made England a constitutional monarchy; a century after that, a collective of wayward colonies shucked even the pretense of the crown, and has persisted for centuries even in the face of war, civil strife, and disagreement. Meanwhile, ‘monarchically’ ruled countries have risen and fallen around the world.Hobbes believes that the human mind is incapable of understanding infinity; for this reason, he argues, we have anthropomorphized God as a vehicle with which to conceptualize that which we cannot… and in fact states that presuming the whereabouts of God is idolatrous (since idols are finite and God is not). He points out that God can speak to mankind either directly or indirectly (i.e. through prophets); but in the latter case, how does one distinguish a prophet from a liar? Or from misinterpreting the scriptures?It seems that his answer neglects to include a useful answer (and, to be fair, it’s no easy task) – but the important point is to establish that laws temporal and spiritual must be enforced by the sovereign to ensure the success of the commonwealth. He delicately implies that the pope’s authority is derived from a misinterpretation of scripture – Charles I was protestant, after all, and Hobbes (like the contemporaneous Treaty of Westphalia) obligingly grants the sovereign power over religious activity. At the same time, though, his views on religion were somewhat unorthodox, and later accusations of heresy would inhibit publication of his later works.Notwithstanding that his driving interest in Leviathan was relatively immediate, Hobbes’ view of man and of government would come to influence the Continental Congress. Both the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Constitution (1789) expressly enumerate the purpose of government and stress the importance of establishing and maintaining peace. The responsibilities accorded to governments are, with a few exceptions, not far removed from the rights of sovereigns enumerated; although his positions supporting governmental infallibility, and opposing free expression and separation of powers were rejected.It seems clear that Hobbes isn’t so much a philosopher or thinker, as he is an observer of history and current affairs. Any Englishman, writing a comprehensive book on government in the 1640s, could reasonably be expected to have emphasized the same points and arrived at the same conclusions. This does not, however, render the text meaningless. On the contrary, it provides a unique perspective on how government itself was viewed at a pivotal moment in British history – perhaps the first moment that people much thought about it. (Most citizens, after all, will not much concern themselves over whether this or that nobleman is the king.)Hobbes’ desire to affiliate with the ‘winning side’ in the English Civil War was ultimately successful; the Cromwell regime judged him to be of no threat (perhaps because he cleverly defined ‘monarchy’ in such a way to include the new Lord Protector), and the restored Charles II later granted him a pension. But his wish to shape politics failed. The crown answered to Parliament after 1688, and the American Declaration of Independence made demands on the king that would have been unthinkable a century before. By inspiring, even in a few, the idea that government – a finite entity – could be defined, Leviathan was paramount to the development of modern political existence.
    • 5/5
      My reactions to reading this book in 1994. It took almost two months to plow through this book, but I’m not sorry I did. Like most “great books”, the things I heard about it were rather simplistic and one-faceted. The actual book was more complex than I expected. I expected a detailed argument in favor of absolute rule, justified by divine right, by a king. Like some of the writings of Cicero, Hobbes, writing at the time of the political upheaval of the English Civil War (Cicero also wrote in a time of civil war), displays a strong desire for strong government to bring about tranquility. But Hobbes is up to much more than just an essay on why the Stuarts should have absolute power. As Oakeshott says in his introduction, Hobbes was fascinated by geometry and it shows in the first part – “Of Man” – in which he develops a rather medieaval (in the sense of human consciousness being described as a series of internal “motions” caused by external objects) theory of psychology. Hobbes, in a style reminescent of a geometrical proof, starts out by defining certain human traits and emotions then constructs, using these definitions, theorems of human psychology. Hobbes view of man is realistic. He sees him as neither purely a creature of emotion (though he dedicates much time to exploring this aspect of humanity) or reason. He sees wisdom and rationality arising from human attempts to predict the future based on experience. The book ends with some surly, sarcastic – but convincing – attacks on key elements of Catholic theology – the immortal soul, eternal torment in hell, purgatory. There is a lot of emphasis on the importance of ghosts – which Hobbes briefly deals with along with demon possession – as pertaining to purgatory, and the arguments about both that were going on at this time, and the trinity. He also takes a shot at the idea of the temporal rule of the Catholic Church over sovereigns. (Some of this is covered under the last section called “Of the Kingdom of Darkness”.) Still, much of the book is Hobbes’ argument not only for an absolute sovereign (whether a king – which he prefers – or committee or assembly) but an absolute theocracy with religion and politics absolutely melded. Hobbes, according to the introduction, gets accussed of immorality. I don’t think Hobbes was amoral or immoral but his philosophy is extremely pragmatic. Hobbes, as the starting point of his philosophy (and this is extended, by contract, to the Leviathan of the state), sees a man as having the right to whatever he desires. The problem – of course – is that a man does not exist, mankind does and each man competes with the other for “honor, riches, and authority”. Hobbes says that man’s life, in a state of nature without government, is, to use his most famous phrase “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. That in nature every man is at war with every other man, that no society, no art, no science, no letters exist, only continual fear. As Hobbes rightly notes, this state of anarchy is so intolerable that even the most primitive tribe has some form of government. However, I think there are a couple of minor flaws to his vision of man’s competition. First, each person has different notions of “honor, riches, and authority”, each niche, each subtle variation in the term “riches”, “honor”, and “authority” can be occuppied by a different person. Second, Hobbes seems to postulate a zero-sum society where one person’s gain is another’s loss. This flies in the face of economic history. Still, Hobbes’ point, that commerce, trade, and economic security can’t exist in such conditions, is true. Hobbes’ ultimate statement – that all religious and political authority must be invested in the Leviathan (the artificial body of the state with the government as its head) to prevent this natural state of war and foster civilization – is understandable given the civil and religious conflicts of English society at the time. However, Hobbes bluntly reaches several conclusions that would make a libertarian wince. Subjects have no right to attempt changing their government. The sovereign cannot forfeit his power. The laws of the commonwealth do not apply to the sovereign. Dissent is not allowed. The sovereign’s power is not limited. Hobbes hates separation of powers too. Hobbes acknowledges that this is a recipe for tyranny. Hobbes even denies the right of dissent based on religious conscience. He demands the outward form of obedience to whatever the sovereign mandates religiously. You can believe, according to him, whatever you want, and God will judge you accordingly, but even God expects absolute obedience. Hobbes says that government wanting power is always much worse than too much power. He blithely adds that the government is always concerned with its subjects' welfare because it is a component of their welfare. He is also quaintly naïve when he says that the sovereign will grant his subjects much freedom because there are many areas he will not seek to regulate. Obviously, he didn’t forsee the regulatory zeal of the modern Leviathan. Still, Hobbes (at least in my very uneducated opinion) seems to straddle not only an authoritarian tradition but a libertarian one. He says that “force and fraud” are the cardinal virtues of war. Presumably that includes the war of man with every other man that occurs in nature. Government is instituted to eliminate this warfare. Interestingly, libertarians view government’s sole legitimate function as preventing “force and fraud”. In other words, like Hobbes, they wish to quell warfare in the state of nature. Libertarians base much of their philosophy on the use of contracts, and Hobbes bases his philosophy on that too. The subject, to avoid the unpleasant state of man in nature, voluntarily gives up his rights and will to a sovereign that promises security from violence. Much of the book is a detailed explication of this idea in its various political and religious implications. However, though Hobbes is about as an extreme advocate of governmental power as there is, he says a subject can – with justice (which, in Hobbes’ terms, means without violating the contract the subject forms with his sovereign) – resist a sovereign’s attempt to kill him. The whole point of the contract, Hobbes argues, is for the subject to avoid death. A subject can also justly refuse to kill himself, testify against themselves, or defend their life (even if they are criminals who have committed an unjust act the state seeks to punish) against the sovereign. While Hobbes views every action of the sovereign authorized by the subject via contract to get security, he points out that logically the contract is void when the subject’s life is at stake.
    • 5/5
      I first read this as an undergraduate in political science, then we read it again in a second social philosophy course (where a chapter had been assigned for my first social philosophy course).
    • 4/5
      I had a bit of trouble reading this book because of the archaic language. I did glean quite a bit of good info from it regarding Hobbes theories on religion, morality, and politics. It's a must read, but take your time.
    • 2/5
      A necessary but unpleasant read. The dilated statist mind has a tentative justification here.
    • 5/5
      "He that is to govern a whole Nation, must read in himself, not this, or that particular man; but Man-kind: which though it be hard to do, harder than to learn any Language, or Science; yet when I shall have set down my own reading orderly, and perspicuously, the pains left another, will be onely to consider if he also find not the same in himself."
    • 4/5
      Hobbe's work is more completely titled "The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil." There is a lot of depth in this work and my weak attempt here is meant more to reinforce the reading within my own mind than to actually convey the entire meaning of Hobbe's great work. Hobbes is among the first in a series of thinkers to contemplate the meaning of life, politics, religion, and humanity in order to put them into some logical context. He does a perfect job of building small parts of his argument and then combining them to make a completely powerful major point. The natural role of the sovereign, obedience to the sovereign, and the endorsement of all of this by God are principal points in Hobbes argument. Later thinkers such as Locke and Rouseau later allowed for the citizenry to break the contract with the sovereign but Hobbes does not allow for that in any way. Much of Hobbe's logic is also based on the scientific discoveries taking place during the time. As part of his debunking other philosophies, he mentions the assertion by Aristotle that all things emit a "visible species," which was then known to be untrue.
    • 4/5
      Most of the bulk of The Leviathan is spent slowly and methodically building and explaining Hobbes' cynical opinion of the state of nature. This is partially why the Leviathan is antiquated today, because we don't deal with states of nature, nobody except anarchists deny the need for government. However in terms of a political science treatise it's effective in establishing the roots and general purpose of government. Whereas The Prince reads as an advisory manual for would-be Kings and is therefore completely anachronistic, The Leviathan is still an effective justification for government. If you already buy that the state of nature is an unacceptable way to live, skip the first (and larger) part of the Leviathan and simply read Hobbes' solution to the problem. Must-have for political scientists.
    • 3/5
      This book was revolutionary for its time but doesn't hold up well to modern-day philosophical scrutiny. Convinced that men were by nature evil, Hobbes argued that the best system of government was a benevolent dictator backed by a powerful army but he doesn't seem to recognize that power corrupts and benevolent dictators are hard to come by.
    • 5/5
      Not to sound too flippant, but I think this book is probably worth reading solely for exceprts such as these:"The Papacy, is no other, than the Ghost of the deceased Romane Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof...""The Ecclesiastiques are the Spirituall men, and Ghostly Fathers. The Fairies are Spirits, and Ghosts. Fairies and Ghosts inhabite Darknesse, Solitudes, and Graves. The Ecclesiastiques walke in Obscurity of Doctrine, in Monasteries, Churches, and Churchyards."Both from The Kingdome of Darknesse
    • 5/5
      Actually, Hobbes' words were 'nasty, brutish, and short.' Leviathan is a great book, but what I find amazing about it is not Hobbes' insights into humans or politics-the continuation of our reliance upon Hobbes to explain state power seems much more the point. Hobbes was one of the first to understand fear as the basis for government, and this has remained, unfortunately, a prevalent view. Read this book, but critically and as a historically great work.
    • 4/5
      A meaningful look into the thoughts and context of the man who gave us the phrase that life is hard brutish and short.

    Book preview

    Leviathan - Thomas Hobbes

    Trayler

    Contents

    Introduction

    Further reading

    Analytic Table of Contents

    Leviathan

    Dedication

    The Introduction

    Part 1: Of Man

    Chapter 1: Of sense

    Chapter 2: Of imagination

    Chapter 3: Of the consequence or train of imaginations

    Chapter 4: Of speech

    Chapter 5: Of reason and science

    Chapter 6: Of the interior beginnings of voluntary motions, commonly called the passions; and the speeches by which they are expressed

    Chapter 7: Of the ends or resolutions of discourse

    Chapter 8: Of the virtues commonly called intellectual; and their contrary defects

    Chapter 9: Of the several subjects of knowledge

    Chapter 10: Of power, worth, dignity, honour, and worthiness

    Chapter 11: Of the difference of manners

    Chapter 12: Of religion

    Chapter 13: Of the natural condition of mankind, as concerning their felicity and misery

    Chapter 14: Of the first and second natural laws, and of contracts

    Chapter 15: Of other laws of nature

    Chapter 16: Of persons, authors, and things personated

    Part 2: Of Commonwealth

    Chapter 17: Of the causes, generation, and definition of a commonwealth

    Chapter 18: Of the rights of sovereigns by institution

    Chapter 19: Of the several kinds of commonwealth by institution, and of succession to the sovereign power

    Chapter 20: Of dominion paternal, and despotical

    Chapter 21: Of the liberty of subjects

    Chapter 22: Of systems subject, political and private

    Chapter 23: Of the public ministers of sovereign power

    Chapter 24: Of the nutrition and procreation of a commonwealth

    Chapter 25: Of counsel

    Chapter 26: Of civil laws

    Chapter 27: Of crimes, excuses, and extenuations

    Chapter 28: Of punishments and rewards

    Chapter 29: Of those things that weaken, or tend to the dissolution of a commonwealth

    Chapter 30: Of the office of the sovereign representative

    Chapter 31: Of the Kingdom of God by nature

    Part 3: Of a Christian Commonwealth

    Chapter 32: Of the principles of Christian politics

    Chapter 33: Of the number, antiquity, scope, authority, and interpreters of the books of Holy Scripture

    Chapter 34: Of the signification of Spirit, Angel, and Inspiration in the books of Holy Scripture

    Chapter 35: Of the signification in Scripture of Kingdom of God, of Holy, Sacred, and Sacrament

    Chapter 36: Of the Word of God, and of prophets

    Chapter 37: Of miracles, and their use

    Chapter 38: Of the signification in Scripture of eternal life, hell, salvation, the world to come, and redemption

    Chapter 39: Of the signification in Scripture of the word Church

    Chapter 40: Of the rights of the kingdom of God, in Abraham, Moses, the high priests, and the kings of Judah

    Chapter 41: Of the office of our blessed Saviour

    Chapter 42: Of power ecclesiastical

    Chapter 43: Of what is necessary for a man’s reception into the kingdom of heaven

    Part 4: Of the Kingdom of Darkness

    Chapter 44: Of spiritual darkness from misinterpretation of Scripture

    Chapter 45: Of daemonology, and other relics of the religion of the Gentiles

    Chapter 46: Of darkness from vain philosophy, and fabulous traditions

    Chapter 47: Of the benefit that proceedeth from such darkness, and to whom it accrueth

    A Review, and Conclusion

    Introduction

    Thomas Hobbes’s book Leviathan was first published in London in April 1651. It made an immediate and powerful impact on its early readers, who regarded it as both an important but also a dangerous book, and in more recent times – in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – it has increasingly come to be regarded as one of the most significant contributions to political philosophy ever written. What sort of a book is it?

    Leviathan is, to begin with, a book written in English. Hobbes was not the first philosopher to publish in English, but Leviathan does stand out for that reason. It would not have had the impact that it did, nor have been as controversial as it was, if Hobbes had written it in the standard philosophical language of the seven­teenth century, Latin (although he did later publish his own Latin translation of the book). Hobbes’s decision to compose Leviathan in English, even though he was living in France at the time, also marks it out as a book written with the politics of mid-seventeenth century England specifically in mind. Yet with the moment of its composition now left long behind, Hobbes’s decision to write in English also means that his words can continue to be read by a global audience over three hundred and fifty years after its first appearance.

    The simple fact of Leviathan’s age means that its language is not always that of our own time. Hobbes’s sentences can some­times be rather lengthy, and some of his expressions may be unfamiliar. (In this edition, for the sake of clarity and accessibility, Hobbes’s spelling has been modernised.) But in general the clarity and force of Hobbes’s language was recognised by readers in his own time – with his contemporary James Harrington even suggesting that ‘future ages’ would account Hobbes ‘the best writer, at this day, in the world’. Hence, though an ever-growing industry of modern scholarship labours and re-labours to establish the meanings of Leviathan, it is not usually because Hobbes’s language is unclear.

    Nor, despite its length, is Leviathan an excessively complicated book. By contrast with some contemporary ‘scholastic’ political philosophy generated in the universities of both Catholic and Protestant Europe, Hobbes does not generally formulate elab­orate distinctions, or consider qualifications or objections to his argu­ments. Leviathan is also funny. Some of Hobbes’s jokes are rather sly and covert, but as the book approaches its end they become increasingly blatant, concluding with his satirical com­parison between ‘Ecclesiastics’ and the Kingdom of Fairies at the end of the final chapter.

    These observations may help us formulate a further general thought by which to approach Hobbes’s English masterpiece. By contrast with his drier and deliberately more technical earlier writings, Leviathan can be seen as offering a wilful and deliberate provocation to its readers. Hobbes wanted his audience to be goaded and shocked by what he had to say. Indeed, he felt that they had much to be provoked about. In a political world characterised – as we shall see – by conflict, violence, usurpation, and execution, the ideas of Leviathan offered a potential means to peace and security, if only they could be put into effect. But to make himself heard, Hobbes needed to be polemical. Readers of Leviathan are supposed to be outraged by the book, but their outrage is intended to shock them out of holding political views which they might otherwise take for granted. Hence much of what Hobbes has to say is magnificently unexpected, and is often dangerous to received wisdom of many sorts. But as the wide­spread reception of his ideas across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and now also in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries demonstrates, Hobbes’s readers have often also found aspects of his political philosophy to be surprisingly attractive.

    As a book, Leviathan is a careful and sophisticated production. It opens with a remarkably detailed and sophisticated frontispiece which depicts in visual form some of the central points of the political theory. (We shall return to this frontispiece at the end of this Introduction.) The text begins with a dedication to the brother of a friend of Hobbes’s who had been killed in 1643 while fighting for the Royalist side in the Civil War in England. After a brief Introduction, Leviathan itself is then divided into four main Parts, each of which announces the appearance of a new and important theme. Nonetheless, each of these Parts also builds carefully upon what has come before. Hobbes’s concern to make what he is saying as clear as possible also emerges from his use of marginal glosses to amplify and clarify his argument. Finally – and rather unusually in the context of seventeenth-century philosophy – Hobbes ends Leviathan with a ‘Review and Conclusion’, which reemphasises some of his key points and also introduces certain new ones.

    The first question faced by a reader of Hobbes’s book is raised by its title: Leviathan, or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Common­wealth Ecclesiastical and Civil. What does ‘Leviathan’ mean? Hobbes quickly answers this question. The Introduction immediately makes clear that the ‘great Leviathan’ stands for the ‘Commonwealth, or State’. The book is therefore about the State: its nature, its form, and its powers. As the title goes on to indicate, some of the state’s powers are ‘civil’ or political, and others are religious or ‘eccles­iastical’. In western Europe in the mid-seventeenth century – as in many parts of the world in the early twenty-first century – managing the relationship between civil and religious authority was a crucial part of political life.

    But why should ‘Leviathan’ be an image of the state? Here the answer is provided by the Bible – the only book that Hobbes discusses extensively in Leviathan, and a work that many of his readers would have known almost by heart. Towards the end of the Book of Job in the Old Testament, a mighty sea-creature appears called ‘Leviathan’ (Job 41:1–34). The biblical description emphasises the invulnerability and invincibility of this Leviathan: it cannot be wounded; it cannot be captured; it cannot even be driven away. The scales that cover its body are joined together so closely that they cannot be separated or even penetrated; no one is brave enough to dare provoke it. Indeed, the description of the biblical beast ends with a verse that Hobbes quotes (in Latin) on the frontispiece of Leviathan: ‘there is no power on earth that can be compared to him’. As one reads through Hobbes’s book it becomes increasingly apparent how well this image of the powerful and invulnerable Leviathan serves to illustrate and encapsulate his theory of the state.

    1

    The first of the four Parts of Leviathan is entitled ‘Of Man’. Its goal is to offer an account of ‘human nature’ that will serve as a starting-point for Hobbes’s political theory. Hobbes was by no means the first philosopher to articulate a theory of ‘human nature’, explicitly so-called. But his decision to make the nature of human beings the starting-point of his specifically political theory was rather unusual. It reflects Hobbes’s consistent and deep interest in the natural, as well as the moral and political sciences.

    Thus Hobbes is not just an original and provocative political theorist: his account of human nature was also no less original, and if anything even more controversial. Why? It is a thoroughly naturalistic theory. One of the most basic assumptions about human nature held by Hobbes’s contemporaries was that human beings were ‘rational animals’. But whereas other philosophers tended to emphasise humans’ ‘rational’ quality, Hobbes himself preferred to stress the qualities human beings shared with other animals. At every turn he takes the opportunity to naturalise qualities which others preferred to regard as exceptional. Thus the process of human thought is described in terms of the questionable faculty of ‘imagination’. The capacity of ‘understanding’, which his contemporaries regarded as an intellectual power uniquely possessed by humans, Hobbes instead says ‘is common to Man and Beast’ (chs. 2–3). And, most troublingly of all, he describes even religion itself as having a ‘natural seed’ in human nature (ch. 12). Hobbes’s naturalism means that, scandalously, he shows little interest in the thought that human beings might be the product of divine creation.

    Most accounts of the subject when Hobbes wrote treated reason as the dominant human faculty, whose role it was to overcome the impulses of passion or emotion. Here again, however, Hobbes’s consistent urge to explain human nature in naturalistic terms leads him to discuss the passions (ch. 6) after he has explained reason (ch. 5), and by implication to suggest that the passions might equal or even dominate reason in human motivation. Hobbes discusses many different passions, but for his political theory, ‘The passion to be reckoned upon, is fear.’ (ch. 14) Fear, the quality consistently associated with the biblical Leviathan, plays an important and often positive role in Hobbes’s philosophy. Another passion stressed by Hobbes, though one with much less positive consequences, is ‘Vainglory’. Vainglory is a ‘foolish over-rating’ of one’s own worth, which Hobbes identifies as a cause of ‘disturbance of commonwealth’, and hence – fatally – of civil war (ch. 27).

    The political implications of Hobbes’s starting-point in ‘human nature’ begin to take firm shape in the later chapters of Part 1 of Leviathan. Though there has been much to provoke the reader already, the picture that Hobbes paints in chapter 13 of ‘mankind’ in its ‘natural condition’ is especially dismal and disturbing. In this ‘condition of war’, every man is an ‘enemy to every man’. Here, too, Hobbes famously describes the natural state of human life as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. But at least as interesting as this memorable description is what precedes it. Here Hobbes allows us an anticipation of what life might be like in a time of peace, under the government of an absolute sovereign power. It is a rich and attractive picture. As well as obvious accoutrements of civilisation such as ‘Arts’, ‘Letters’, and ‘Society’, Hobbes’s picture includes ‘Industry’ – that is, fruitful labour of all kinds – such as agriculture, travel, trade, architecture, and surveying. Hobbes’s vision of a flourishing civilisation even includes the construction of ‘instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force’ – that is, levers, pulleys, and cranes. The so-called ‘industrial revolution’ lay over a hundred years in the future, but Hobbes’s sense of the capacity of technology to improve the human condition was already firmly in place.

    Hence, despite its dominant images of competition, warfare and death, chapter 13 of Leviathan ends with a hint that something better might be possible. The same qualities of human nature that lead in the ‘natural condition of mankind’ to a life of impoverished misery also provide a means to escape this condition. Just as our passions encourage competition and vainglory, so they also lead us to a ‘fear’ of death and to a ‘desire’ of ‘such things as are necessary to commodious living’ – that is, to seek a more comfortable or convenient existence. And in order to attain this existence, the human faculty of ‘reason’ suggests to us certain ‘articles of peace’. In chapters 14 and 15 Hobbes goes on to elaborate these articles. They are ‘conclusions’ or ‘theorems’ that reason teaches us about how to preserve and defend ourselves, and he calls them by the traditional name of ‘laws of Nature’.

    Part 1 of Leviathan is therefore about the world of nature. But nature, though it is the starting-point of all human life, cannot make that life either peaceful, safe, or industrious. To obtain these things, humans need to enter the world of artifice, and to construct for their common peace and defence the ‘artificial’ person of the State.

    2

    Hobbes is often regarded as a ‘social contract’ theorist, who shares a broad account of politics with John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau insofar as all three of their theories rest upon the basis of an agreement or contract between governors and governed. While it is certainly true that both Locke and Rousseau read Hobbes’s writings carefully, this view of his political philosophy is a potentially misleading one. In the first place, the process by which the agreement of a multitude of people brings the state into being is not, for Hobbes, a contract but rather a ‘covenant’; in the second, it is crucial for Hobbes’s political theory that the state is first created, not by means of an agreement between the people and their sovereign, but rather by means of an agreement among the people themselves.

    Hobbes introduces the notion of a ‘covenant’ in the course of chapter 14 of Leviathan. A covenant, he explains there, is a special form of contract in which one of the parties delivers the ‘thing contracted on’ but the other party is left ‘to perform his part at some determinate time after’. This special form of contract comes into its own a little later on, in chapter 17 at the beginning of Part 2. This chapter is in several ways the heart of Leviathan’s political philosophy. It is here that Hobbes puts to work all the elements that he has painstakingly constructed over the course of Part 1: the naturally passionate nature of human beings; men’s natural love of dominion over others; the ‘miserable condition of War’ that results from these elements; and the rational knowledge of the laws of nature – laws which nonetheless are impossible to keep if there is no ‘Power’ to ‘cause them to be observed’.

    The purpose of chapter 17 is therefore to explain the creation of a common power which can ‘keep men in awe’ and force them to live peaceably in society. As Hobbes’s marginal gloss concisely puts it, it explains ‘the generation of a commonwealth’. This common­wealth or state is not, in the first instance, generated by an agreement between a sovereign and a people: it is generated by virtue of an agreement made between a multitude of people themselves. Hobbes even provides the formula by which this occurs: it is, he says,

    as if every man should say to every man, I authorise and give up my right of governing my self, to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy rght to him, and authorise all his actions in like manner.

    This agreement is provisional – it is made on a ‘condition’ of future action on the part of every other man – and hence the agreement is a covenant, not a contract.

    The entity that this covenant creates is, first, the state:

    This done, the multitude so united in one person, is called a Commonwealth, in Latin Civitas. 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.

    But the state needs a soul to animate it, and Hobbes now also turns to this question. Drawing upon the theory of representation that he has previously laid out in chapter 16, he explains that the ‘essence’ of the state is its sovereign, who bears or carries the ‘person’ of the state. This sovereign is by no means necessarily a king: it can be either ‘one man’, or an ‘assembly of men’. The possession of ‘sovereign power’ brings with it a crucial benefit: it confers the united right of government that has been given up by each member of the multitude. And it also has the further consequence of making every one who is not sovereign, a ‘Subject’. From a condition of mere nature, Hobbes has thus now provided a detailed and consistent account of how an absolute sovereign power derives from a naturally free multitude (ch. 17).

    Much of the power of Hobbes’s political vision therefore comes from the contrasts he draws in creating it. From a natural ‘con­dition of war’ (ch. 13), Hobbes brings about the creation of a ‘political commonwealth’ (ch. 17). From a repudiation of the condition of ‘natural liberty’ (ch. 13), Hobbes explains how the ‘liberty of subjects’ is in fact preferable (ch. 21). From the willing consent of individuals (ch. 17), Hobbes creates a con­dition of absolute sovereignty (ch. 18). And out of a multitude of particular men, Hobbes, by means of his theory of representation (ch. 16), creates a ‘unity’ in the person of the sovereign. Every­thing in the political philosophy of Leviathan is thus directed – as Hobbes himself sums up at the end of his book – towards grounding both the ‘civil right of sovereigns’ and the ‘duty and liberty of subjects’, upon the ‘known natural inclinations of mankind’ and on the ‘articles of the law of Nature’ (Review and Conclusion).

    3

    Leviathan develops a body of ideas that Hobbes had been thinking about for over a decade. He had first articulated them in his book The Elements of Law in 1640 and then again in his Latin treatise On the Citizen in 1642. Certain other aspects of Leviathan may also derive from Hobbes’s work as a tutor to the future Charles II in Paris in the later 1640s. But the fact remains that Hobbes seems to have written up Leviathan itself at remarkable speed. It was first published in April 1651, and we first hear of Hobbes writing it in May 1650. How can we explain Hobbes’s intense application to a lengthy new book on a subject on which he had already written two previous and in certain ways similar works? The best answer is that Leviathan is a specific response to the political circumstances of the late 1640s and very early 1650s. Indeed, Hobbes explicitly tells us as much: in the very final paragraph he writes that Leviathan was ‘occasioned’ – that is, caused – ‘by the disorders of the present time’ (Review and Conclusion).

    These disorders had first begun to manifest themselves in 1639, when Charles I led an English army north with the goal of imposing a Book of Common Prayer and episcopal church govern­ment upon the Presbyterian Scots. In April 1640 Charles convened the so-called Short Parliament to seek support for his campaign against the Scots. This Parliament, however, declined to support the King, and instead raised a series of grievances against his rule. This was the context in which Hobbes produced his first work of political theory, The Elements of Law. This was an overtly monarchist book, in which democratic and aristocratic modes of government were compared unfavourably to monarchical ones. Copies circulated in manuscript among those sympathetic to the claims of the King rather than Parliament, and shortly after writing it Hobbes fled to France out of a fear that a resurgent Parliament might punish the author of a book so favourable to absolute monarchy.

    Hobbes wrote in The Elements of Law (pt ii, ch. 5) that ‘the greatest inconvenience that can happen to a commonwealth is the aptitude to dissolve into civil war’. But this is exactly what happened in England by the late summer of 1642, when Royalist and Parliamentarian forces first confronted each other in arms. Hobbes’s response was to restate his theory of absolute sovereignty in his treatise On the Citizen, written in Latin and published in a limited edition at Paris in late 1642. The civil wars were fought in Britain across the years 1642–46 and 1648. And in 1647 Hobbes published two further widely-distributed editions of his book On the Citizen at Amsterdam, with a number of textual additions and revisions. Meanwhile in England the King became the captive of hostile forces from early 1647 onwards, and in January 1649 he was tried by a court specially constituted by a ‘Rump’ Parliament that had been purged of all MPs unsympathetic to the Army. The charge against him was that he had ‘traitorously’ made war against Parliament and the people represented by Parliament. On 30 January 1649, Charles I was executed.

    From this moment England was no longer a monarchy. Instead it was governed by Parliament as a ‘Commonwealth and Free State’, with executive decisions taken by a Council of State whose members were also chosen by Parliament. The office of King was abolished, and so too were the House of Lords and the established Church of England. Even without Hobbes’s explicit attestation of the fact, it will thus be clear that Leviathan is a book that emerged from a period of intense political turmoil in England. One of the central questions that has vexed readers of Leviathan is therefore this: does it offer support to the royalist, or to the parliamentarian cause?

    There is no straightforward answer to this question. In the same sentence in which Hobbes wrote that Leviathan was ‘occasioned by the disorders of the present time’ he also wrote that his book was written ‘without partiality’ – without, that is, showing favour to any particular side. At an explicit level this is broadly true. From the Elements of Law onwards Hobbes had consistently framed his political philosophy as standing above the fray of contemporary political argument. Though there are one or two very occasional moments in Leviathan when Hobbes explicitly draws attention to contemporary political debates, on the whole he writes without reference to political events or to the controversies that surrounded them. Hobbes’s commitment to writing philo­soph­ically meant that he preferred to leave to his readers the business of applying his ideas in practice.

    But this is not to say that Leviathan should not also be seen as an intervention in the political debates that had arisen in the after­math of the civil wars and the founding of the Common­wealth of England, even if it is not an obviously ‘partial’ inter­vention. In many respects Leviathan is indeed deliberately even-handed. In particular, in articulating his theory of sovereignty Hobbes scrupulously and even repetitively insists that sovereignty may be held either by ‘one man, as in monarchy’, or by one ‘assembly of men, as in popular and aristocratical commonwealths’ (ch. 20; and see generally chs. 17 and 18). The potential application of this formula to either the English monarchy held by the house of Stuart on the one hand, or to the Rump Parliament (or perhaps the Council of State) on the other, is clear. Hobbes’s theory of sovereignty also leads him to insist that the three possible ‘kinds’ of commonwealth – whether governed by one person, as in monarchy; by a few people, as in an aristocracy; or by many people, as in a democracy – do not differ according to ‘the difference of power’, but rather by ‘difference of con­ven­ience’ – that is, by how well each kind can ‘produce the peace and security of the people’. Regardless of the form of govern­ment, the undivided sovereign power is the same (ch. 19).

    In other respects, however, the royalism to which Hobbes’s previous political writings had tended – and which his personal circumstances as a tutor of Prince Charles and a habitué of the royal court in Paris strongly implied – also emerges strongly from Leviathan. Hobbes’s royalism is apparent in his plangent reminder that Charles I had been a monarch who ‘had the sovereignty from a descent of 600 years, was alone called sovereign, had the title of Majesty from every one of his subjects, and was unquestionably taken by them for their king.’ Hobbes also makes a favourable comparison of monarchy with other forms of government. In a monarchy (he asserts) the ‘public’ interest of the monarch is ‘the same’ as the ‘private interest’ of his subjects – whereas it is not in an aristocracy or a democracy. Similarly, a monarch ‘cannot disagree with himself’, whereas an assembly may, ‘and that to such a height, as may produce a civil war’. Even in the case of succession to the sovereign power, where (Hobbes concedes) the ‘greatest difficulty’ lies in monarchy – since one person can die, but an assembly of men can renew itself perpetually – even in this case there are ‘natural signs’ by which a legitimate successor can be known (ch. 19).

    It happens that England had faced a crisis of succession in the last years and at the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603. Refusing to countenance the inevitability of her own death, Elizabeth had deliberately failed to nominate her successor – something that Hobbes explicitly castigates as being a ‘fault’ of which ‘many princes’ were guilty. The problem of who was to succeed to the English crown had been resolved by inviting Charles I’s father James, then king of Scotland, also to become king of England. It is not an accident, therefore, that it is at the conclusion of his discussion of the merits of the different kinds of commonwealth that Hobbes should have spoken explicitly about the political opport­unities that the succession of King James had brought about. As Hobbes writes at the end of chapter 19, in the first years of his reign James VI & I had ‘aimed at’ bringing about a ‘union of his two realms of England and Scotland’. He had failed to achieve this, largely owing to the hostility of the English Parliament. But for Hobbes this was a disaster. If James had obtained his goal of uniting his Scottish and English kingdoms, it would ‘in all likelihood’ have ‘prevented the civil wars, which make both those kingdoms, at this present, miserable’. For as well as being a war between royal and parliamentarian armies, the civil wars of the 1640s were also a conflict between English and Scottish armies. Scarcely less than contention between royal and parliamentary authority, then, a multiplication of kingdoms presented a threat to Hobbes’s insist­ence on the necessity of undivided sovereignty.

    Yet for all its professed impartiality, and for all that it contains powerful defences of monarchical government and scathing attacks on detractors of kings, Leviathan is not ultimately a royalist book. For in certain important ways it offers a justification of political authority that was compatible with support for the post-regicide regime in England. That is to say, although Hobbes expresses a consistent and deep hostility to those who rebel against sovereign power, his theory is also capable of accounting for political alleg­iance in the aftermath of a successful rebellion. Hobbes conceived Leviathan, as we have seen, fundamentally as an argu­ment to ‘advance the civil power’ (Introduction). But what happens when the location of that civil power changes – as it had in England with the defeat of the royalist armies, the execution of the King, the establishment of a non-monarchical ‘Common­wealth’ and the gen­eral pacification of the nation? These events had reinforced the sense that any adequate theory of political obligation, such as Hobbes’s set out to be, must be able to account for such a situation.

    In chapter 21 Hobbes states that subjects’ obligation to their sovereign ‘is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth by which he is able to protect them.’ This equation between protection and obedience was firmly restated in the Review and Conclusion of Leviathan. Indeed, Hobbes now went so far as to claim it as the only goal of his argument. He concludes his book with the striking claim that he has written Leviathan ‘without other design’ – without, that is, any other purpose – ‘than to set before men’s eyes the mutual relation between protection and obedience’. In short, if a power is successfully preserving your existence, then you owe it your submission.

    Though Hobbes’s argument regarding the limits of obligation is consistent across Leviathan, his insistence upon it in the closing Review and Conclusion cannot help but emphasise the clear application of his point: that during the ‘continuance of public peace’ which England was now enjoying under the sovereignty of the Commonwealth, subjects owed obedience not to the exiled Charles Stuart, son of the executed Charles I, but rather to the Parliamentary regime which then governed the Commonwealth of England. The ‘right’ of a sovereign, in short, does not depend on how ‘it was at first gotten’, but instead upon the simple ‘possession’ of it.

    This striking doctrine leads Hobbes to formulate one of his more lapidary observations on politics. Political obligation could hardly operate in any other fashion, he suggests, since ‘there is scarce a commonwealth in the world, whose beginnings can in conscience be justified.’ In a thought which David Hume (another careful reader of Hobbes) would later develop in the mid-eighteenth century, Hobbes suggests that behind every legitimate sovereign there lies a potentially illegitimate conquest. Indeed, as he archly points out, the claim to sovereignty of the kings of England themselves depended upon ‘the goodness of the cause of William the Conqueror’.

    The question whether Leviathan is a royalist or a parliamentarian book is thus not a mistaken one to ask. But it cannot ultimately capture the multivalent implications of Hobbes’s political theory at the time it was published. Nor does it fully allow for the fact that different nuances of emphasis and even of allegiance may be observed at different moments within Hobbes’s book itself – nuances that may partly be explained simply in terms of the rapidly developing political circumstances across which the book was written. Nor finally, does an answer to such a question account for the many different ways in which Hobbes’s masterpiece of English political philosophy has been read since its first publication in 1651. The meaning of Hobbes’s treatise certainly should be explored in relation to the circumstances of its composition and first appearance. But its continued fascination to new generations of readers also derives from Hobbes’s own philosophical commit­ment to producing a science of politics not ultimately reducible to the conflicts that occasioned it.

    4

    Leviathan is a classic of political philosophy, and as such one of the principal questions it addresses is the relationship between politics and religion. Hobbes’s interest in religion emerges early on, in Part 1 of Leviathan. In chapter 6 he hints at future themes by defining ‘Religion’ as a ‘Fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imagined from tales publicly allowed’. And he devotes chapter 12 to a discussion of the natural causes or ‘seeds’ of religion in human nature. He also claims there that religion ‘can never be so abolished out of human nature, but that new religions may again be made to spring out of them.’ Thus Hobbes’s handling of religion here is of a part with his general urge to naturalise human nature in Part 1 of Leviathan. But it is in Parts 3 and 4 of his book that Hobbes turns to consider the particular place in politics of Christian religion.

    Hobbes wrote Leviathan in the context of a Europe that was powerfully and (as it then appeared) irredeemably divided by religion. In the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation at the beginning of the sixteenth century different European polities had officially adopted different Christian confessions: Roman Catholic; Lutheran; Reformed; and – in the case of England – a state Church which regarded itself, rather uneasily, as being at once Protestant, Catholic and Reformed. Moreover, though almost every country had significant minorities which followed a different confession, the governing ideal throughout Europe – a doomed ideal – was to seek religious uniformity across Christendom as a whole. Contro­versy between the different confessions was therefore one of the most prominent features of European intellectual life in the seven­teenth century. Moreover, this controversy sometimes descended from points of speculative theological doctrine into bitter polemic and indeed violence.

    Much of Leviathan should be understood in this context of confessional controversy, which comes to the fore in Parts 3 and 4 of Hobbes’s book. This second half of the book is characterised by a strong anti-Catholicism. The politics of the Christian Common­­wealth that Hobbes lays out in Part 3 are consistently framed against Catholic targets, and in particular the most authoritative Roman Catholic theologian of the period, Cardinal Robert Bell­armine. This in itself would not have concerned many of Hobbes’s English readers, who would have found several of his arguments against papal authority rather familiar. Where Leviathan became much more problematic for its early Protestant readers lay in the suspicion Hobbes provokes – in Part 4 above all – that he is not challenging Roman Catholicism alone, but rather the authority of any clerical class whatsover. Hence though Hobbes’s satirical comparison of the papal hierarchy with the Kingdom of Fairies at the end of chapter 47 is ostensibly aimed at Roman Catholic ‘ecclesiastics’, not a few of his English readers thought – with good reason – that the abusive things he had to say there applied to anyone who regarded himself as a minister of God.

    But the most important aspect of Hobbes’s handling of religion concerns the relationship between civil and ecclesiastical power. In many European territories the different religious confessions that had arisen after the Reformation were tightly integrated into the structure of the state. In England in particular the monarch had been the supreme head or governor of the Church of England since 1534. In Catholic countries the highest power in the Church was of course the Pope. One of the most controversial questions in post-Reformation politics, as it had also been in the later middle ages, was therefore whether the Pope’s authority extended to temporal polit­ical affairs. A papalist strand within Roman Catholic theology asserted that it did. Hence Pope Pius V had excommun­icated Queen Elizabeth in 1570, and thereby released her Catholic subjects from allegiance to the English crown. In 1588, the year of Hobbes’s birth, Pope Sixtus V had supported the Spanish Armada’s attempted invasion of England, with the goal of restoring the nation to Catholicism. The Gunpowder Plot of 1605, an attempt to blow up King James I together with his Parliament, was ascribed to Catholic plotters guided by the Jesuit idea that it was legitimate to assassinate heretical rulers. A consequence of these events was that enormous intellectual energies were expended in earlier seventeenth-century England in developing arguments to counter papal claims to both temporal and eccles­iastical supremacy.

    As Hobbes makes clear at the end of chapter 33, much of Part 3 of Leviathan is concerned with these questions. A crucial aspect of his argument for the indivisible nature of sovereign power is that it extends it from the realm of civil power to include the sphere of ecclesiastical power. ‘Christian sovereigns’, on Hobbes’s account, unequivocally possessed ‘supreme ecclesiastical power’ as well. The civil sovereign was the ‘supreme pastor’ of ‘the whole flock of his subjects’. In consequence, Hobbes’s sovereign also has power to appoint subordinate pastors, and to deprive them of their office (ch. 42). Even more strikingly, Hobbes’s sovereign even has the authority both to define what constitutes holy scripture and then to interpret it. Though Hobbes does not deny that the Bible contains the laws of God, he asserts that they can only be known as such by command of the sovereign.

    A further consequence of Hobbes’s line of argument in this respect is Leviathan’s lack of patience with arguments for political resistance made on the basis of conscience. The appeal to private conscience had been one of the principal points of contention for critics and opponents of the Church of England in the later sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries. Such appeals generally came from the sort of English protestant who regarded the estab­lished church as being insufficiently reformed. In the 1640s in particular, arguments from conscience had been put to dangerous use in justifying and encouraging armed resistance to the King.

    Hobbes’s response in Leviathan was effectively to assert that thought remained free, but that actions must be conformed to the civil power. ‘Belief and unbelief never follow men’s com­mands’, but the subject must obey and make whatever ‘profession with the tongue’ he is commanded to do. Hobbes illustrates this point with a striking example which forces his implied Christian readership to detach themselves from their own con­victions and abstract his argument to a more general situation. Suppose (Hobbes says) a Christian sovereign had a subject who, ‘inwardly in his heart’, was a Muslim (or as Hobbes puts it, in the usual formulation of the period, a ‘Mohametan’). If this Muslim was commanded on pain of death to attend a Christian service, what would these Christian defenders of conscientious objection have him do? If they say he must allow himself to be put to death rather than obey, then they are effectively saying that anyone can disobey their sovereign on religious grounds, whether that religion is true or false. But if they say that this hypothetical Muslim ought to conform to save himself from punishment, then they are treating the Muslim differently from themselves – and thereby violating Christ’s command that his followers must do as they would be done by (ch. 42). Hobbes’s challenging dilemma exposes his readers’ assumptions about the claims of conscience in politics. In a characteristic moment of Hobbesian paradox, there­fore, the implications of his political theory tend not towards religious uniformity, but towards religious toleration – but only insofar as a diversity of religious practice is not prejudicial to the civil power.

    Hobbes’s religious targets are thus not restricted to the Roman Catholics whom he attacks frequently and explicitly throughout Parts 3 and 4 of Leviathan. Catholics made an acceptable and uncontroversial butt both of his arguments and of his humour. But behind that target stands a more local and equally dangerous one: Scottish and English Protestants, and especially adherents of Pres­byt­erianism. Hobbes only rarely mentions Presbyterians explicitly in Leviathan. But when he does so on a few occasions towards the end of the book, it is always to condemn their perilous claim (shared with the Roman Catholic church which they so feared and despised) to possess a power over the people that stands in conflict with the power held by the sovereign.

    The final Part of Leviathan is entitled ‘Of the Kingdom of Darkness’ – a traditional name in Christian theology for Hell. But Hobbes is not so much interested here in the question of life after death (which he treats in chapter 38) as he is in the political hell that is created by challenges to sovereign power made on grounds of religion. The authors of this religious darkness are, as he makes explicit in chapter 47, both ‘the Roman and the Presbyterian clergy’. Protestants no less than Roman Catholics have been guilty of trying to erect an alternative power to that of the lawful and indivisible sovereign. Indeed, it is with this point that Hobbes ends the final chapter of his book: ‘it is not the Roman clergy only’ that pretends to have a power ‘distinct from that of the civil state’. For Hobbes, there can be no toleration for religiously-motivated actions that set themselves up in competition with that mortal god, the almighty Leviathan.

    5

    With this account of some of the key themes of Hobbes’s book behind us, we are now in a position to consider the point at which Hobbes’s book begins: its engraved title-page (reproduced on page 3 in this edition). The image that Hobbes commissioned to preface his book encapsulates its principal themes with remarkable success. Most striking of all is the grave central figure: a crowned head set upon a body consisting of numerous people who are all looking towards the face in awe. Here, then, is the sovereign who is brought into being by the covenant of ‘every man with every man’; this is ‘that great Leviathan’ that provides its subjects with peace and defence. Indeed, the people themselves appear remarkably like the scales of the Leviathan described in the Bible: so tightly packed that no weapon can penetrate them.

    The figure of the Leviathan holds in its hands the two symbols of sovereign authority: in its right hand the sword of civil power, and in its left the crozier (a stylised shepherd’s crook) of eccles­iastical power. Holding these mighty instruments without fear of compet­ition, the Leviathan can protect the peaceful scene over which it looks. It is a scene of agriculture, of commerce (ships sail peacefully across the sea), and of an industrious urban life which has no doubt been facilitated by those ‘instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force’ which cannot be found in the state of nature. Here, that is to say, are the ‘contentments of life’ which it is the sovereign’s duty to procure for the people (ch. 30). But the peaceful scene in the top half of the image is peaceful for a reason. Underneath the sword of civil power sits a fortress guarded by well-disciplined troops; and underneath the crozier of eccles­iastical power is an ample church – perhaps even a cathedral – that dominates the many other smaller churches that dot the landscape around the city.

    Here, then, is a flourishing Commonwealth – indeed, a flour­ishing Christian Commonwealth. But beneath it, in the bottom half of the title-page, we find a descent into the kingdom of darkness. Again the elements on each side correspond to the sword and crozier. Beneath the civil sword are things that chall­enge its undivided authority: the castle and ducal coronet of an over-mighty baron; a cannon and a trophy of weapons; and finally the consequences of all of these things: two equal armies joined in civil war. On the other side of the page, underneath the crozier, are the equivalent emblems of ecclesiastical strife. First appear a church and a bishop’s ceremonial hat, or mitre. Beneath these are the weapons wielded by divisive clerics: a thunderbolt symbol­ising the power of excommunication – so fatal to civil authority – and a collection of pitchforks labelled with the technical scholastic jargon that was used to pursue logical argu­ments and to uphold papal authority. At the bottom, finally, is the clerical equivalent of civil war: a scholastic disputation between high-ranking churchmen, all of them arguing, as Hobbes tells us, ‘in vain’ (ch. 42).

    Like Hobbes’s political philosophy, the details of the image which introduces it are complex. But the essence of his politics is as clear as the central figure of his frontispiece. It lies in the sovereign figure of Leviathan: a figure who, by its overwhelming power – generated from the consent of a multitude of people, sustained by their obedience, and also by working unfailingly to suppress all challenges to its undivided civil and ecclesiastical power – brings to each of its subjects the inestimable benefits of protection, and of peace.

    Richard Serjeantson

    Trinity College, Cambridge

    Suggestions for further reading

    Introductory

    Tom Sorell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes (Cam-bridge, 1996)

    Patricia Springborg (ed.),The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan (Cambridge, 2007)

    Richard Tuck, Hobbes: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2002)

    Studies of specific aspects of Leviathan

    Noel Malcolm, Editorial Introduction. Vol. I of Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Malcolm, 3 vols. (Oxford, 2012)

    Jon Parkin, Taming the Leviathan: The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England 1640–1700 (Cambridge, 2007)

    Philip Pettit, Made with Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politics (Princeton, 2008)

    Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge, 2008)

    Tom Sorrell and Luc Foisneau (eds.), Leviathan after 350 Years (Oxford, 2004)

    A critical edition of both the English and the Latin Leviathan

    Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. by Noel Malcolm, 3 vols. (Oxford, 2012).

    Note on the text

    In this edition Leviathan’s original spelling has been modernised. In addition, the postils or shoulder-notes that Hobbes provides in the margins of his text have been placed together at the front of the book to create an analytic table of contents (pages xxxi–liii) that offers ready access to the details of Hobbes’s argument.

    Analytic table of contents

    [based on the shoulder notes in the text]

    Part 1: Of Man

    Chapter 1: Of Sense

    Sense.

    Chapter 2: Of imagination

    Imagination.

    Memory.

    Dreams.

    Apparitions or visions.

    Understanding.

    Chapter 3: Of the consequence or train of imaginations

    Train of thoughts unguided.

    Train of thoughts regulated.

    Remembrance.

    Prudence.

    Signs.

    Conjecture of the past.

    Infinite.

    Chapter 4: Of speech

    Original of speech.

    The use of speech.

    Abuses of speech.

    Names, proper and common.

    Universal.

    Necessity of definitions.

    Subject to names.

    Names.

    Use of names positive.

    Negative names, with their uses.

    Words insignificant.

    Understanding.

    Inconstant names.

    Chapter 5: Of reason and science

    Reason, what it is.

    Reason defined.

    Right reason, where.

    The use of reason.

    Of error and absurdity.

    Causes of absurdity.

    Science.

    Prudence and sapience, with their difference.

    Signs of science.

    Chapter 6: Of the interior beginnings of voluntary motions, commonly called the passions; and the speeches by which they are expressed

    Motion, vital and animal.

    Endeavour.

    Appetite. Desire.

    Hunger. Thirst.

    Aversion.

    Love. Hate.

    Contempt.

    Good. Evil.

    Pulchrum. Turpe.

    Delightful. Profitable.

    Unpleasant. Unprofitable.

    Delight.

    Displeasure.

    Pleasure.

    Offence.

    Pleasures of sense.

    Pleasures of the mind.

    Hope.

    Despair.

    Fear.

    Courage.

    Anger.

    Confidence.

    Diffidence.

    Indignation.

    Benevolence.

    Good nature.

    Covetousness.

    Ambition.

    Magnanimity.

    Valour.

    Liberality.

    Miserableness.

    Kindness.

    Natural lust.

    Luxury.

    The passion of love.

    Jealousy.

    Revengefulness.

    Curiosity.

    Religion.

    Superstition.

    True religion.

    Panic terror.

    Admiration.

    Joy.

    Glory.

    Vainglory.

    Dejection.

    Sudden glory.

    Laughter.

    Sudden dejection.

    Weeping.

    Shame.

    Blushing.

    Impudence.

    Pity.

    Cruelty.

    Emulation.

    Envy.

    Deliberation.

    The will.

    Forms of speech, in passion.

    Good and evil apparent.

    Felicity.

    Praise.

    Magnification.

    Makarismos.

    Chapter 7: Of the ends or resolutions of discourse

    Judgment, or sentence final.

    Doubt.

    Science.

    Conscious.

    Belief. Faith.

    Chapter 8: Of the virtues commonly called intellectual; and their contrary defects

    Intellectual virtue defined.

    Wit, natural or acquired.

    Natural wit.

    Good wit, or fancy.

    Good judgment.

    Discretion.

    Prudence.

    Craft.

    Acquired wit.

    Giddiness.

    Madness.

    Rage.

    Melancholy.

    Madness.

    Insignificant speech.

    Chapter 9: Of the several subjects of knowledge

    Knowledge.

    Chapter 10: Of power, worth, dignity, honour, and worthiness

    Power.

    Worth.

    Dignity.

    To honour and dishonour.

    Honourable.

    Dishonourable.

    Coats of arms.

    Titles of honour.

    Worthiness.

    Fitness.

    Chapter 11: Of the difference of manners

    What is here meant by manners.

    A restless desire of power in all men.

    Love of contention from competition.

    Civil obedience from love of ease.

    From fear of death, or wounds.

    And from love of arts.

    Love of virtue from love of praise.

    Hate, from difficulty of requiting great benefits.

    And from conscience of deserving to be hated.

    Promptness to hurt, from fear.

    And from distrust of their own will.

    Vain undertaking from vainglory.

    Ambition, from opinion of sufficiency.

    Irresolution, from too great valuing of small matters.

    Confidence in others, from ignorance of the marks of wisdom and kindness.

    And from ignorance of natural causes.

    And from want of understanding.

    Adherence to custom, from ignorance of the nature of right and wrong.

    Adherence to private men, from ignorance of the causes of peace.

    Credulity, from ignorance of nature.

    Curiosity to know, from care of future time.

    Natural religion from the same.

    Chapter 12: Of religion

    Religion in man only.

    First, from his desire of knowing causes.

    From the consideration of the beginning of things.

    From his observation of the sequel of things.

    The natural cause of religion, the anxiety of the time to come.

    Which makes them fear the power of invisible things.

    And suppose them incorporeal.

    But know not the way how they effect any thing.

    But honour them as they honour men.

    And attribute to them all extraordinary events.

    Four things, natural seeds of religion.

    Made different by culture.

    The absurd opinions of Gentilism.

    The designs of the authors of the religion of the heathen.

    The true religion and the laws of God’s kingdom the same.

    The causes of change in religion.

    Enjoining belief of impossibilities.

    Doing contrary to the religion they establish.

    Want of the testimony of miracles.

    Chapter 13: Of the natural condition of mankind, as concerning their felicity and misery.

    Man by nature equal.

    From equality proceeds diffidence.

    From diffidence war.

    Out of civil states, there is always war of every one against every one.

    The incommodities of such a war.

    In such a war nothing is unjust.

    The passions that incline men to peace.

    Chapter 14: Of the first and second natural laws, and of contracts

    Right of nature, what.

    Liberty, what.

    A law of nature, what.

    Difference of right and law.

    Naturally every man has right to every thing.

    The fundamental law of nature.

    The second law of nature.

    What it is to lay down a right.

    Renouncing a right, what it is.

    Not all rights are alienable.

    Contract, what.

    Covenant, what.

    Free-gift.

    Signs of contract express.

    Promise.

    Signs of contract by inference.

    Free gift passeth by words of the present or past.

    Signs of contract are words both of the past, present, and future.

    Merit, what.

    Covenants of mutual trust, when invalid.

    Right to the end, containeth right to the means.

    No covenant with beasts.

    Nor with God without special revelation.

    No covenant, but of possible and future.

    Covenants how made void.

    Covenants extorted by fear are valid.

    The former covenant to one, makes void the later to another.

    A man’s covenant not to defend himself is void.

    No man obliged to accuse himself.

    The end of an oath.

    The form of an oath.

    No oath but by God.

    An oath adds nothing to the obligation.

    Chapter 15: Of other laws of nature

    The third law of nature, justice.

    Justice and injustice, what.

    Justice and propriety begin with the constitution of com­mon­wealth.

    Justice not contrary to reason.

    Covenants not discharged by the vice of the person to whom they are made.

    Justice of men and justice of actions, what.

    Justice of manners, and justice of actions.

    Nothing done to a man by his own consent can be injury.

    Justice commutative and distributive.

    The fourth law of nature, gratitude.

    The fifth, mutual accommodation, or complaisance.

    The sixth, facility to pardon.

    The seventh, that in revenges, men respect only the future good.

    The eighth, against contumely.

    The ninth, against pride.

    The tenth, against arrogance.

    The eleventh, equity.

    The twelfth, equal use of things common.

    The thirteenth, of lot.

    The fourteenth, of primogeniture.

    The fifteenth, of mediators.

    The sixteenth, of submission to arbitrement.

    The seventeenth, no man is his own judge.

    The eighteenth, no man to be judge, that has in him a natural cause of partiality.

    The nineteenth, of witnesses.

    A rule, by which the laws of nature may easily be examined.

    The laws of nature oblige in conscience always, but in effect then only when there is security.

    The laws of nature are eternal.

    And yet easy.

    The science of these laws, is the true moral philosophy.

    Chapter 16: Of persons, authors, and things personated

    A person, what.

    Person natural, and artificial.

    The word person, whence.

    Actor.

    Author.

    Authority.

    Covenants by authority, bind the author.

    But not the actor.

    The authority is to be shown.

    Things personated, inanimate.

    Irrational.

    False gods.

    The true God.

    A multitude of men, how one person.

    Every one is author.

    An actor may be many men made one by plurality of voices.

    Representatives, when the number is even, unprofitable.

    Negative voice.

    Part 2: Of Commonwealth

    Chapter 17: Of the causes, generation, and definition of a common­wealth

    The end of commonwealth, particular security:

    Which is not to be had from the law of nature:

    Nor from the conjunction of a few men or families:

    Nor from a great multitude, unless directed by one judgment:

    And that continually.

    Why certain creatures without reason, or speech, do never­theless live in society, without any coercive power.

    The generation of a commonwealth.

    The definition of a cvommonwealth.

    Sovereign, and subject, what.

    Chapter 18: Of the rights of sovereigns by institution

    The act of instituting a commonwealth, what.

    The consequences to such institutions, are:

    1. The subjects cannot change the form of government.

    2. Sovereign power cannot be forfeited.

    3. No man can without injustice protest against the instit­ution of the sovereign declared by the major part.

    4. The sovereign’s actions cannot be justly accused by the subject.

    5. Whatever the sovereign doth is unpunishable by the subject.

    6. The sovereign is judge of what is necessary for the peace and defence of his subjects.

    And judge of what doctrines are fit to be taught them.

    7. The right of making rules; whereby the subjects may every man know what is so his own, as no other subject can without injustice take it from him.

    8. To him also belongeth the right of judicature and decision of controversy.

    9. And of making war, and peace, as he shall think best.

    10. And of choosing all counsellors and ministers, both of peace and war.

    11. And of rewarding and punishing (where no former law hath determined the measure of it) arbitrarily.

    12. And of honour and order.

    These rights are indivisible.

    And can by no grant pass away without direct renouncing of the sovereign power.

    The power and honour of subjects vanisheth in the presence of the power sovereign.

    Sovereign power not so hurtful as the want of it, and the hurt proceeds for the greatest part from not submitting readily to a less.

    Chapter 19: Of the several kinds of commonwealth by institution, and of succession to the sovereign power

    The different forms of commonwealth but three.

    Tyranny and oligarchy, but different names of monarchy and aristocracy.

    Subordinate representatives dangerous.

    Comparison of monarchy, with sovereign assemblies.

    Definition of monarchy, and other forms.

    Of the right of succession.

    The present monarch hath right to dispose of the succession.

    Succession passeth by express words;

    Or, by not controlling a custom;

    Or, by presumption of natural affection.

    To dispose of the succession, though to a king of another nation, not unlawful.

    Chapter 20: Of dominion paternal, and despotical

    A commonwealth by acquisition.

    Wherein different from a commonwealth by institution.

    The rights of sovereignty the same in both.

    Dominion paternal how obtained.

    Not by generation, but by contract;

    Or education;

    Or precedent subjection of one of the parents to the other.

    The right of succession followeth the rules of the right of possession.

    Despotical dominion how obtained.

    Not by the victory, but by the consent of the vanquished.

    Difference between a family and a kingdom.

    The rights of monarchy from Scripture.

    Sovereign power ought in all commonwealths to be absolute.

    Chapter 21: Of the liberty of subjects

    Liberty, what.

    What it is to be free.

    Fear and liberty consistent.

    Liberty and necessity consistent.

    Artificial bonds, or covenants.

    Liberty of subjects consisteth in liberty from covenants.

    Liberty of the subject consistent with the unlimited power of his sovereign.

    The liberty which writers praise, is the liberty of sovereigns; not of private men.

    Liberty of subjects how to be measured.

    Subjects have liberty to defend their own bodies, even against them that lawfully invade them.

    And are not bound to hurt themselves.

    Nor to warfare, unless they voluntarily undertake it.

    The greatest liberty of subjects, dependeth on the silence of the law.

    In what cases subjects are absolved of their obedience to their sovereign.

    In case of captivity.

    In case the sovereign cast off the government from himself and his heirs.

    In case of banishment.

    In case the sovereign render himself subject to another.

    Chapter 22: Of systems subject, political, and private

    The divers sorts of systems of people.

    In all bodies politic the power of the represenattive is limited.

    By letters patent:

    And the laws.

    When it is an assembly, it is the act of them that assented only.

    When the representative is one man, if he borrow money, or owe it, by contract, he is liable only, the members not.

    When it is an assembly, they only are liable that have assented.

    If the debt be to one of the assembly, the body only is obliged.

    Protestation against the decrees of bodies politic sometimes lawful, but against sovereign power never.

    Bodies politic for government of a province, colony, or town.

    Bodies politic for ordering of trade.

    A body politic for counsel to be given to the sovereign.

    A regular private body, lawful, as a family.

    Private bodies regular, but unlawful.

    Systems irregular, such as are private leagues.

    Secret cabals.

    Feuds of private families.

    Factions for government.

    Concourse of people.

    Chapter 23: Of the public ministers of sovereign power.

    Public minister, who.

    Ministers for the general administration.

    For special administration, as for economy.

    For instruction of the people.

    For judicature.

    For execution.

    Councillors without other employment than to advise are not public ministers.

    Chapter 24: Of the nutrition and procreation of a commonwealth

    The nourishment of a commonwealth consisteth in the commodities of sea and land.

    And the right distribution of them.

    All private estates of land proceed originally from the arbitrary distribution of the sovereign.

    Propriety of a subject excludes not the dominion of the sovereign, but only of another subject.

    The public is not to be dieted.

    The places and matter of traffic depend, as their distrib­ution, on the sovereign.

    The laws of transferring propriety belong also to the sovereign.

    Money the blood of a commonwealth.

    The conduits and way of money to the public use.

    The children of a commonwealth colonies.

    Chapter 25: Of counsel

    Counsel, what.

    Differences between command and counsel.

    Exhortation and dehortation, what.

    Differences of fit

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