In 1651, Thomas Hobbes published the book, Leviathan or The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil. Our contemporaries have shortened the title to simply Leviathan. The book gets its name, Leviathan, from the Leviathan, a sea monster or dragon found in the Old Testament.
In 1648, a few short years before Hobbes published Leviathan, many of the major powers in Europe signed The Peace of Westphalia. One of the tenants of these various treaties was that all parties would recognize the Peace of Augsburg that was originally signed in 1555. The Peace of Augsburg was essentially a treaty based on the principle of cuius region eius religio or “Whose realm, his religion.” Essentially this meant that the religion of the ruler dictated the religion of the ruled.
This is important in terms of political philosophy because prior to the principle of cuius region eius religio, the various monarchies across Europe were sanctioned by the Bishop of Rome (the Pope) in a coronation ceremony. This ceremony reinforced the idea that the kings were appointed by God to rule over their kingdoms (divine right). However, the principle of cuius region eius religio – “whose realm, his religion” presented a new problem in political philosophy. If the king was no longer anointed by the church and appointed by God, then from where do these monarchs derive their power?
In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes major concern was the structure of society and its legitimate government – essentially, what makes governments legitimate and from where do they derive their power. Hobbes’ theory of government is regarded as one of the earliest and most influential examples of social contract theory. For Hobbes, the social contract is the foundation of states and legitimate governments. Hobbes comes to the idea of the social contract by stripping away all of the layers of society and reducing man to a state of nature. According to Hobbes, in order to understand why we have society and government, we must first establish how it came into being – we must move beyond our conceptions of government and start over from a foundation that predates government.
Hobbes begins Leviathan from a very mechanistic understanding of human nature. He explains what it would be like without a society or a government and calls this condition of man a “state of nature.” In this state of nature, each and every person on the planet has a right or a license to everything in the world – we humans can do whatever we want to whomever we want with impunity. This condition of man in a state of nature, according to Hobbes, would lead to a “war of all against all” and as a result, our lives would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Because the “war of all against all” in this “state of nature” would not be beneficial to anyone, mankind must seek a way to escape this perpetual state of war. In order to do this, men living in a state of nature agree to a social contract and establish a civil society. For Hobbes, a society is the population of a people beneath a sovereign authority and that the population gives up their natural rights that exist in a state of nature for the sake of mutual protection.
In addition, Hobbes believes that any abuses on the part of the sovereign authority are to be accepted as the price of the peace that comes with not living in a state of nature. Hobbes also claims that the sovereign must control all of the civil, military, and judicial institutions. In addition, the sovereign must also control the church. It is important to note that Hobbes wrote Leviathan during the English Civil War (also known as The Glorious Revolution) and that Hobbes might have been trying to demonstrate the necessity of a strong central government because of the events that were taking place around him.
We can say a few very general things about how Hobbes sees society. For him, all of a society’s institutions should function as “top down” institutions. That is, the authority and power must rest in the hands of the sovereign at the top and those who occupy subordinate positions in civil society must simply follow the dictates of those who wield the power and authority. While this system of organizing society is far from being perfect, it is likely that Hobbes would say that we cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good and that any egregious acts on the part of those who wield the power and authority are regrettable but are also the price that we must pay in order to live in peace – in order to not be subject to the “war of all against all” that exists in the state of nature.
Source: Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. projectgutenberg.org
