Leviathan - THE MATTER, FORME, & POWER OF A COMMON-WEALTH ECCLESIASTICAL AND CIVILL: The 100 best nonfiction books: No 94 - Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651)

By Thomas Hobbes and Ambassador Midas Touch GEMS

REVIEWS of LEVIATHAN By Thomas Hobbes

 

The 100 best nonfiction books: No 94 - Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651)

Thomas Hobbes's essay on the social contract is both a founding text of western thought and a masterpiece of wit and imagi

• Language: English
• Publisher: Midas Touch GEMS
• Release date: May 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781088160312

Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was one of the founding fathers of modern philosophy. An Englishman, Hobbes was heavily influenced by his country's civil war and wrote his preeminent work, Leviathan, about the relationship between the individual and the government during that period. Hobbes was a scholar, phauthoilosopher, and the author of several works on political and religious philosophy.

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LEVIATHAN

By Thomas Hobbes and Ambassador at Midas Touch GEM

1651

LEVIATHAN OR THE MATTER,

FORME, & POWER OF A COMMON-WEALTH

ECCLESIASTICAL AND CIVILL

Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury ––––––––Printed for Andrew Crooke,

at the Green Dragon

in St. Paul’s Churchyard,

1651.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES ON THE E-TEXT:

This E-text was prepared from the Pelican Classics edition of Leviathan, which in turn was prepared from the first edition. I have tried to follow as closely as possible the original, and to give the flavour of the text that Hobbes himself proof-read, but the following differences were unavoidable.

Hobbes used capitals and italics very extensively, for emphasis, for proper names, for quotations, and sometimes, it seems, just because.

The original has very extensive margin notes, which are used to show where he introduces the definitions of words and concepts, to give in short the subject that a paragraph or section is dealing with, and to give references to his quotations, largely but not exclusively biblical. To some degree, these margin notes seem to have been intended to serve in place of an index, the original having none. They are all in italics.

He also used italics for words in other languages than English, and there are a number of Greek words, in the Greek alphabet, in the text.

To deal with these within the limits of plain vanilla ASCII, I have done the following in this E-text.

I have restricted my use of full capitalization to those places where Hobbes used it, except in the chapter headings, which I have fully capitalized, where Hobbes used a mixture of full capitalization and italics.

Where it is clear that the italics are to indicate the text is quoting, I have introduced quotation marks. Within quotation marks I have retained the capitalization that Hobbes used.

Where italics seem to be used for emphasis, or for proper names, or just because, I have capitalized the initial letter of the words. This has the disadvantage that they are not then distinguished from those that Hobbes capitalized in plain text, but the extent of his italics would make the text very ugly if I was to use an underscore or slash.

Where the margin notes are either to introduce the paragraph subject, or to show where he introduces word definitions, I have included them as headers to the paragraph, again with all words having initial capitals, and on a shortened line.

For margin references to quotes, I have included them in the text, in brackets immediately next to the quotation. Where Hobbes included references in the main text, I have left them as he put them, except to change his square brackets to round.

For the Greek alphabet, I have simply substituted the nearest ordinary letters that I can, and I have used initial capitals for foreign language words.

Neither Thomas Hobbes nor his typesetters seem to have had many inhibitions about spelling and punctuation. I have tried to reproduce both exactly, with the exception of the introduction of quotation marks.

In preparing the text, I have found that it has much more meaning if I read it with sub-vocalization, or aloud, rather than trying to read silently. Hobbes’ use of emphasis and his eccentric punctuation and construction seem then to work.

About the Author - Thomas Hobbes – The English Philosopher

THOMAS HOBBES, (BORN April 5, 1588, Westport, Wiltshire, England—died December 4, 1679, Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire), English philosopher, scientist, and historian, best known for his political philosophy, especially as articulated in his masterpiece Leviathan (1651). Hobbes viewed government primarily as a device for ensuring collective security. Political authority is justified by a hypothetical social contract among the many that vests in a sovereign person or entity the responsibility for the safety and well-being of all. In metaphysics, Hobbes defended materialism, the view that only material things are real. His scientific writings present all observed phenomena as the effects of matter in motion. Hobbes was not only a scientist in his own right but a great systematizer of the scientific findings of his contemporaries, including Galileo and Johannes Kepler. His enduring contribution is as a political philosopher who justified wide-ranging government powers on the basis of the self-interested consent of citizens.

Early life

Hobbes’s father was a quick-tempered vicar of a small Wiltshire parish church. Disgraced after engaging in a brawl at his own church door, he disappeared and abandoned his three children to the care of his brother, a well-to-do glover in Malmesbury. When he was four years old, Hobbes was sent to school at Westport, then to a private school, and finally, at 15, to Magdalen Hall in the University of Oxford, where he took a traditional arts degree and in his spare time developed an interest in maps.

For nearly the whole of his adult life, Hobbes worked for different branches of the wealthy and aristocratic Cavendish family. Upon taking his degree at Oxford in 1608, he was employed as page and tutor to the young William Cavendish, afterward the second earl of Devonshire. Over the course of many decades Hobbes served the family and their associates as translator, traveling companion, keeper of accounts, business representative, political adviser, and scientific collaborator. Through his employment by William Cavendish, the first earl of Devonshire, and his heirs, Hobbes became connected with the royalist side in disputes between the king and Parliament that continued until the 1640s and that culminated in the English Civil Wars (1642–51). Hobbes also worked for the marquess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a cousin of William Cavendish, and Newcastle’s brother, Sir Charles Cavendish. The latter was the centre of the Wellbeck Academy, an informal network of scientists named for one of the family houses at Wellbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire.

INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT of Thomas Hobbes

The two branches of the Cavendish family nourished Hobbes’s enduring intellectual interests in politics and natural science, respectively. Hobbes served the earls of Devonshire intermittently until 1628; Newcastle and his brother employed him in the following decade. He returned to the Devonshires after the 1640s. Through both branches of the Cavendish family, and through contacts he made in his own right on the Continent as traveling companion to various successors to the Devonshire title, Hobbes became a member of several networks of intellectuals in England. Farther afield, in Paris, he became acquainted with the circle of scientists, theologians, and philosophers presided over by the theologian Marin Mersenne. This circle included René Descartes.

Hobbes was exposed to practical politics before he became a student of political philosophy. The young William Cavendish was a member of the 1614 and 1621 Parliaments, and Hobbes would have followed his contributions to parliamentary debates. Further exposure to politics came through the commercial interests of the earls of Devonshire. Hobbes attended many meetings of the governing body of the Virginia Company, a trading company established by James I to colonize parts of the eastern coast of North America, and came into contact with powerful men there. (Hobbes himself was given a small share in the company by his employer.) He also confronted political issues through his connection with figures who met at Great Tew; with them he debated not only theological questions but also the issues of how the Anglican church should be led and organized and how its authority should be related to that of any English civil government.

In the late 1630s Parliament and King Charles I were in conflict over how far normal kingly powers could be exceeded in exceptional circumstances, especially in regard to raising money for armies. In 1640 Hobbes wrote a treatise defending the king’s own wide interpretation of his prerogatives. Royalist members of Parliament used arguments from Hobbes’s treatise in debates, and the treatise itself circulated in manuscript form. The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (written in 1640, published in a misedited unauthorized version in 1650) was Hobbes’s first work of political philosophy, though he did not intend it for publication as a book.

The development of Hobbes the scientist began in his middle age. He was not trained in mathematics or the sciences at Oxford, and his Wiltshire schooling was strongest in classical languages. His interest in motion and its effects was stimulated mainly through his conversation and reading on the Continent, as well as through his association with the scientifically and mathematically minded Wellbeck Cavendishes. In 1629 or 1630 Hobbes was supposedly charmed by Euclid’s method of demonstrating theorems in the Elements. According to a contemporary biographer, he came upon a volume of Euclid in a gentleman’s study and fell in love with geometry. Later, perhaps in the mid-1630s, he had gained enough sophistication to pursue independent research in optics, a subject he later claimed to have pioneered. Within the Wellbeck Academy, he exchanged views with other people interested in the subject. And as a member of Mersenne’s circle in Paris after 1640, he was taken seriously as a theorist not only of ethics and politics but of optics and ballistics. Indeed, he was even credited with competence in mathematics by some very able French mathematicians, including Gilles Personne de Roberval.

Self-taught in the sciences and an innovator at least in optics, Hobbes also regarded himself as a teacher or transmitter of sciences developed by others. In this connection he had in mind sciences that, like his own optics, traced observed phenomena to principles about the sizes, shapes, positions, speeds, and paths of parts of matter. His great trilogy—De Corpore (1655; Concerning Body), De Homine (1658; Concerning Man), and De Cive (1642; Concerning the Citizen)—was his attempt to arrange the various pieces of natural science, as well as psychology and politics, into a hierarchy, ranging from the most general and fundamental to the most specific. Although logically constituting the last part of his system, De Cive was published first, because political turmoil in England made its message particularly timely and because its doctrine was intelligible both with and without natural-scientific preliminaries. De Corpore and De Homine incorporated the findings of, among others, Galileo on the motions of terrestrial bodies, Kepler on astronomy, William Harvey on the circulation of the blood, and Hobbes himself on optics. The science of politics contained in De Cive was substantially anticipated in Part II of The Elements of Law and further developed in Leviathan; or, The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil (1651), the last—and in the English-speaking world the most famous—formulation of Hobbes’s political philosophy (see below Hobbes’s system).

Exile in Paris

When strife became acute in 1640, Hobbes feared for his safety. Shortly after completing The Elements of Law, he fled to Paris, where he rejoined Mersenne’s circle and made contact with other exiles from England. He would remain in Paris for more than a decade, working on optics and on De Cive, De Corpore, and Leviathan. In 1646 the young prince of Wales, later to become Charles II, sought refuge in Paris, and Hobbes accepted an invitation to instruct him in mathematics.

Political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes

Hobbes presented his political philosophy in different forms for different audiences. De Cive states his theory in what he regarded as its most scientific form. Unlike The Elements of Law, which was composed in English for English parliamentarians—and which was written with local political challenges to Charles I in mind—De Cive was a Latin work for an audience of Continental savants who were interested in the new science—that is, the sort of science that did not appeal to the authority of the ancients but approached various problems with fresh principles of explanation.

De Cive’s break from the ancient authority par excellence—Aristotle—could not have been more loudly advertised. After only a few paragraphs, Hobbes rejects one of the most famous theses of Aristotle’s politics, namely that human beings are naturally suited to life in a polis and do not fully realize their natures until they exercise the role of citizen. Hobbes turns Aristotle’s claim on its head: human beings, he insists, are by nature unsuited to political life. They naturally denigrate and compete with each other, are very easily swayed by the rhetoric of ambitious persons, and think much more highly of themselves than of other people. In short, their passions magnify the value they place on their own interests, especially their near-term interests. At the same time, most people, in pursuing their own interests, do not have the ability to prevail over competitors. Nor can they appeal to some natural common standard of behaviour that everyone will feel obliged to abide by. There is no natural self-restraint, even when human beings are moderate in their appetites, for a ruthless and bloodthirsty few can make even the moderate feel forced to take violent preemptive action in order to avoid losing everything. The self-restraint even of the moderate, then, easily turns into aggression. In other words, no human being is above aggression and the anarchy (chaos) that goes with it.

War comes more naturally to human beings than political order. Indeed, political order is possible only when human beings abandon their natural condition of judging and pursuing what seems best to each and delegate this judgment to someone else. This delegation is effected when the many contract together to submit to a sovereign in return for physical safety and a modicum of well-being. Each of the many in effect says to the other: I transfer my right of governing myself to X (the sovereign) if you do too. And the transfer is collectively entered into only on the understanding that it makes one less of a target of attack or dispossession than one would be in one’s natural state. Although Hobbes did not assume that there was ever a real historical event in which a mutual promise was made to delegate self-government to a sovereign, he claimed that the best way to understand the state was to conceive of it as having resulted from such an agreement.

In Hobbes’s social contract, the many trade liberty for safety. Liberty, with its standing invitation to local conflict and finally all-out war—a war of every man against every man—is overvalued in traditional political philosophy and popular opinion, according to Hobbes; it is better for people to transfer the right of governing themselves to the sovereign. Once transferred, however, this right of government is absolute, unless the many feel that their lives are threatened by submission. The sovereign determines who owns what, who will hold which public offices, how the economy will be regulated, what acts will be crimes, and what punishments criminals should receive. The sovereign is the supreme commander of the army, supreme interpreter of law, and supreme interpreter of scripture, with authority over any national church. It is unjust—a case of reneging on what one has agreed—for any subject to take issue with these arrangements, for, in the act of creating the state or by receiving its protection, one agrees to leave judgments about the means of collective well-being and security to the sovereign. The sovereign’s laws and decrees and appointments to public office may be unpopular; they may even be wrong. But unless the sovereign fails so utterly that subjects feel that their condition would be no worse in the free-for-all outside the state, it is better for the subjects to endure the sovereign’s rule.

Agathon (centre) greeting guests in Plato's Symposium, oil on canvas by Anselm Feuerbach, 1869; in the Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe, Germany.

It is better both prudentially and morally. Because no one can prudently welcome a greater risk of death, no one can prudently prefer total liberty to submission. Total liberty invites war, and submission is the best insurance against war. Morality too supports this conclusion, for, according to Hobbes, all the moral precepts enjoining virtuous behaviour can be understood as derivable from the fundamental moral precept that one should seek peace—that is to say, freedom from war—if it is safe to do so. Without peace, he observed, humans live in continual fear, and danger of violent death, and what life they have is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. What Hobbes calls the laws of nature, the system of moral rules by which everyone is bound, cannot be safely complied with outside the state, for the total liberty that people have outside the state includes the liberty to flout the moral requirements if one’s survival seems to depend on it.

The sovereign is not a party to the social contract; he receives the obedience of the many as a free gift in their hope that he will see to their safety. The sovereign makes no promises to the many in order to win their submission. Indeed, because he does not transfer his right of self-government to anyone, he retains the total liberty that his subjects trade for safety. He is not bound by law, including his own laws. Nor does he do anything unjustly if he makes decisions about his subjects’ safety and well-being that they do not like.

Although the sovereign is in a position to judge the means of survival and well-being for the many more dispassionately than they are able to do themselves, he is not immune to self-interested passions. Hobbes realizes that the sovereign may behave iniquitously. He insists that it is very imprudent for a sovereign to act so iniquitously that he disappoints his subjects’ expectation of safety and makes them feel insecure. Subjects who are in fear of their lives lose their obligations to obey and, with that, deprive the sovereign of his power. Reduced to the status of one among many by the defection of his subjects, the unseated sovereign is likely to feel the wrath of those who submitted to him in vain.

Hobbes’s masterpiece, Leviathan (1651), does not significantly depart from the view of De Cive concerning the relation between protection and obedience, but it devotes much more attention to the civil obligations of Christian believers and the proper and improper roles of a church within a state (see church and state). Hobbes argues that believers do not endanger their prospects of salvation by obeying a sovereign’s decrees to the letter, and he maintains that churches do not have any authority that is not granted by the civil sovereign.

Hobbes’s political views exerted a discernible influence on his work in other fields, including historiography and legal theory. His political philosophy is chiefly concerned with the way in which government must be organized in order to avoid civil war. It therefore encompasses a view of the typical causes of civil war, all of which are represented in Behemoth; or, The Long Parliament (1679), his history of the English Civil Wars. Hobbes produced the first English translation of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, which he thought contained important lessons for his contemporaries regarding the excesses of democracy, the worst kind of dilution of sovereign authority, in his view.

Hobbes’s works on church history and the history of philosophy also strongly reflect his politics. He was firmly against the separation of government powers, either between branches of government or between church and state. His ecclesiastical history emphasizes the way in which power-hungry priests and popes threatened legitimate civil authority. His history of philosophy is mostly concerned with how metaphysics was used as a means of keeping people under the sway of Roman Catholicism at the expense of obedience to a civil authority. His theory of law develops a similar theme regarding the threats to a supreme civil power posed by common law and the multiplication of authoritative legal interpreters.

Return to England

There are signs that Hobbes intended Leviathan to be read by a monarch, who would be able to take the rules of statecraft from it. A specially bound copy was given to Prince Charles while he was in exile in Paris. Unfortunately, Hobbes’s suggestion in Leviathan that a subject had the right to abandon a ruler who could no longer protect him gave serious offense to the prince’s advisers. Barred from the exiled court and under suspicion by the French authorities for his attack on the papacy (see below), Hobbes found his position in Paris becoming daily more intolerable. At the end of 1651, at about the time that Leviathan was published, he returned to England and made his peace with the new regime of Oliver Cromwell. Hobbes submitted to that authority for a long time before the monarchy was restored in 1660.

From the time of the Restoration in 1660, Hobbes enjoyed a new prominence. Charles II received Hobbes again into favour. Although Hobbes’s presence at court scandalized the bishops and the chancellor, the king relished his wit. He even granted Hobbes a pension of £100 a year and had his portrait hung in the royal closet. It was not until 1666, when the House of Commons prepared a bill against atheism and profaneness, that Hobbes felt seriously endangered, for the committee to which the bill was referred was instructed to investigate Leviathan. Hobbes, then verging upon 80, burned such of his papers as he thought might compromise him.

Optics of Thomas Hobbes

Hobbes’s most significant contributions to natural science were in the field of optics. An optical theory in his day was expected to pronounce on the nature of light, on the transmission of light from the Sun to the Earth, on reflection and refraction, and on the workings of optical instruments such as mirrors and lenses. Hobbes took up these topics in several relatively short treatises and in correspondence, including with Descartes on the latter’s Dioptrics (1637). The most polished of Hobbes’s optical works was A Minute or First Draught of the Optiques (1646).

In its mature form, Hobbes’s optical theory held that the dilations and contractions of an original light source, such as the Sun, are transmitted by contact with a uniform, pervading ethereal medium, which in turn stimulates the eye and the nerves connected to it, eventually resulting in a phantasm, or sense-image, in the brain. In Hobbes’s theory, the qualities of a sense-image do not need to be explained in terms of the qualities of a perceived object. Instead, motion and matter—the motion of a light source, the disturbance of a physical nervous system, and sensory membranes—are all that have to be invoked. In contrast, traditional optics—optics as developed within Aristotle’s framework—had held that seeing the colour of something—the redness of a strawberry, for example—was a matter of reproducing the form of the colour in the sense organs; the form is then abstracted from the sense organs by the mind. Sensible forms, the characteristic properties transmitted by objects to the senses in the act of perception, were entirely dispensed with in Hobbes’s optics.

Hobbes’s system

Theories that trace all observed effects to matter and motion are called mechanical. Hobbes was thus a mechanical materialist: He held that nothing but material things are real, and he thought that the subject matter of all the natural sciences consists of the motions of material things at different levels of generality. Geometry considers the effects of the motions of points, lines, and solids; pure mechanics deals with the motions of three-dimensional bodies in a full space, or plenum; physics deals with the motions of the parts of inanimate bodies insofar as they contribute to observed phenomena; and psychology deals with the effects of the internal motions of animate bodies on behaviour. The system of the natural sciences described in Hobbes’s trilogy represents his understanding of the materialist principles on which all science is based.

The fact that Hobbes included politics as well as psychology within his system, however, has tended to overshadow his insistence on the autonomy of political understanding from natural-scientific understanding. According to Hobbes, politics does not need to be understood in terms of the motions of material things (although, ultimately, it can be); a certain kind of widely available self-knowledge is evidence enough of the human propensity to war. Although Hobbes is routinely read as having discerned the laws of motion for both human beings and human societies, the most that can plausibly be claimed is that he based his political philosophy on psychological principles that he thought could be illuminated by general laws of motion.

Last years and influence

Although he was impugned by enemies at home, no Englishman of the day stood in such high repute abroad as Hobbes, and distinguished foreigners who visited England were always eager to pay their respects to the old man, whose vigour and freshness of intellect remained unquenched. In his last years Hobbes amused himself by returning to the classical studies of his youth. The autobiography in Latin verse with its playful humour, occasional pathos, and sublime self-complacency was brought forth at the age of 84. In 1675 he produced a translation of the Odyssey in rugged English rhymes, with a lively preface, Concerning the Virtues of an Heroic Poem. A translation of the Iliad appeared in the following year. As late as four months before his death, he was promising his publisher somewhat to print in English.

Hobbes’s importance lies not only in his political philosophy but also in his contribution to the development of an anti-Aristotelian and thoroughly materialist conception of natural science. His political philosophy influenced not only successors who adopted the social-contract framework—John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant, for example—but also less directly those theorists who connected moral and political decision making in rational human beings to considerations of self-interest broadly understood. The materialist bent of Hobbes’s metaphysics is also much in keeping with contemporary Anglo-American, or analytic, metaphysics, which tends to recognize as real only those entities that physics in particular or natural science in general presupposes.

REVIEWS of LAVIATHAN By Thomas Hobbes

The 100 best nonfiction books: No 94 – Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651)

Thomas Hobbes’s essay on the social contract is both a founding text of western thought and a masterpiece of wit and imagination

ACCORDING TO THE 17TH-century historian and gossip John Aubrey, Thomas Hobbes was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men, he should have known no more than other men. As a great thinker, Hobbes epitomises English common sense and the amateur spirit, and is all the more appealing for deriving his philosophy from his experience as a scholar and man of letters, a contemporary and occasional associate of Galileo, Descartes and the young Charles Stuart, prince of Wales, before the Restoration.

Hobbes himself was born an Elizabethan, and liked to say that his premature birth in 1588 was caused by his mother’s anxiety at the threat of the Spanish Armada:

... it was my mother dear

Did bring forth twins at once, both me, and fear.

Throughout his long life, Hobbes was never far either from the jeopardy of the times (notably the thirty years’ war and the English civil war) or the jeopardy sponsored by the brooding realism and pragmatic clarity of his philosophy. What, asked Hobbes, was the form of politics that would provide the security that he and his contemporaries longed for, but were always denied?

frontispeice of leviathan by thomas hobbes

The famous frontispiece to Leviathan. Photograph: Alamy

Subtitled The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, Leviathan first appeared in 1651, during the Cromwell years, with perhaps the most famous title page in the English canon, an engraving of an omnipotent giant, composed of myriad tiny human figures, looming above a pastoral landscape with sword and crosier erect.

Thus the Leviathan (sovereign power) entered the English lexicon, and Hobbes’s vision of man as not naturally a social being, animated by a respect for community, but a purely selfish creature, motivated by personal advantage, became condensed into his celebrated summary of mankind’s existence as solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.

It was Hobbes’s argument that, to ameliorate these conditions, man should adopt certain Laws of Nature by which human society would be forbidden to do that which is destructive of life, whereby virtue would be the means of peaceful, sociable and comfortable living.

The first law of nature is: every man ought to endeavour peace. This, he argues, will be a hard goal: the general inclination of all mankind is a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death. The second law of nature is: a man [must] be willing when others are so too ... to lay down his right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself. The third law of nature is: men performe their Covenants made.

This, in essence, adds up to Hobbes’s social contract, enforced by an external power. Accordingly, members of civil society should enter into a contract to confer their power and strength upon one Man, or upon an Assembly of men ... This done, the Multitude so united in one Person, is called a Common-wealth. For Hobbes, the contracting of such power is the only guarantee of peace and prosperity: During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is every man against every man.

Having witnessed the English revolution at first hand, it is war above all that Hobbes most fears. Social warfare empowers mankind’s darkest side: Force, and fraud, are in war the two cardinal virtues.

Hobbes is never less than ironical in his attitude to humanity’s appetite for government. He had seen too much debate, before and after the execution of Charles I, about the relationship between, citizen, church and state to be anything but pragmatic: they that are discontented under monarchy, call it tyranny; and they that are displeased with aristocracy, call it oligarchy; so also, they which find themselves grieved under a democracy, call it anarchy, which signifies the want of government; and yet I think no man believes, that want of government, is any new kind of government.

For Hobbes, the political community is paramount, and individuals must surrender themselves for their own further and better protection: he that complaineth of injury from his sovereign complaineth that whereof he himself is the author; and therefore ought not to accuse any man but himself; no nor himself of injury; because to do injury to one’s self, is impossible.

As numerous commentators have observed, Leviathan is the founding document of the social contract theory that would eventually flourish in the western intellectual tradition. It is also a majestic monument of 17th-century English prose, at once sinewy and vivid:

Riches, knowledge and honour are but several sorts of power.

Hobbes also illuminates his argument with many delicious asides:

The Papacy is not other than the Ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.

This comparison of the papacy with the kingdom of fairies (that is, to the old wives’ fables in England concerning ghosts and spirits) is a reminder of the philosopher’s pre-eminent wit and imagination. Combined with the economy, candour and irony of Leviathan as a whole, it marks Hobbes out as one of the truly great writers in the English literary canon. But he is also a giant of western philosophy whose influence can be found in the work of Rousseau and Kant.

Not that his contemporaries understood this. Hobbism became a term of opprobrium, Leviathan was publicly burnt as a seditious document, and Hobbes himself spent many of his later years in fear for his life. He died in 1679, suffering from Parkinson’s disease. According to Vanbrugh, on his deathbed he said he was 91 years finding out a hole to go out of this world, and at length found it. His apocryphal last words were: I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.

A signature sentence

In such condition [of Warre], there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.

Wall Street Journal When a liberal pundit fawns over China's global-warming policies, one sees the Hobbesian within.

By Jeffrey Collins

Updated July 16, 2010 12:01 am ET

The philosopher Thomas Hobbes is now a good deal more popular than he once was. When his Leviathan appeared in 1651 it was denounced everywhere. England's King's Charles II, a believer in the divine right of kings, disliked its coolly rational account of sovereignty. The Church of England loathed its attacks on Christian orthodoxy. Hobbes later claimed that agents of the king tried to assassinate him and bishops of the church to burn him alive. If they tried, they failed, but during his lifetime Leviathan was banned in England and across Europe. Upon his passing in 1679, Hobbes was known (after his birthplace) as the Monster of Malmesbury.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704518904575365090478493142

AMAZON.COM  REVIEW1,149 total ratings, 259 with reviews

Leviathan - Thomas Hobbes

George H. Smith

3.52

50 ratings4 reviews

This presentation explores the social and political turmoil during which Leviathan was written, including an examination of the radical political philosophies spawned by opposition to the Stuart monarchy in England. It explains the materialistic foundation of Hobbes' philosophy and how this influenced his theory of man, society, and government.

Special attention is paid to Hobbes' theory of the state of nature, the social contract, and the governmental sovereignty. The right of resistance against unjust laws and the right to liberty of conscience also are discussed.

GenresPhilosophyClassicsPolitics

JOHN WISWELL

Author 39 books404 followers

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September 23, 2007

George Smith's review of Hobbes' masterwork is engaging and succinct. It is no replacement for the real Leviathan, but a useful companion, refresher or tool for review. Though twenty years old, the recording is clear and the inflections are pleasant such that I almost listened to all the cassettes in one long sitting. Smith's history is slim, but still provides a little necessary cultural and historic background for Hobbes' life, other works that were linked to Leviathan's conclusions, and events or relationships that impacted his work. There only a couple of points where Smith either praises Hobbes' too much or doesn't seem to try hard enough to understand his logic (at one point he actually gives up and calls Hobbes' views on good in the state of nature sloppy and ceases to try to explain it).

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Jude

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June 21, 2022

An interesting and informative explanation of Thomas Hobbes's philosophy and Leviathan. I had never heard of Leviathan but from NaS's mention of it in the song It Ain't Hard to Tell, which demonstrates just how intelligent NaS is to have grown up in the projects, dropped out of high school, and still even heard about Leviathan.

My digression about NaS notwithstanding, I enjoyed learning about Hobbesian philosophy, the social contract, and Hobbes's ultimate conclusion through his reasoning that government is the highest form of order.

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Alex Shrugged

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January 19, 2022

Hmm... I knew the word Hobbesian meant something ungood, but now I have a better understanding of it. It has a sort of logic to it. The king is always right and is accountable only to God. One might think that kings would have loved Hobbes, but not always. No. He barely escaped with his life.

Hobbesianism remains something ungood in my mind.

I might read/listen to the audiobook again.

Amazon.com Reviews from the United States

J. Hauck (Guerrilla Reader)

5.0 out of 5 stars The First Modern Support and Defense of Social Contract Theory

Reviewed in the United States on May 27, 2013

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Review of Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiastical and Civill (Leviathan), by Thomas Hobbes (b. 1588- d. 1679). Hobbes was known for his views on how humans could thrive in harmony while avoiding the perils and fear of societal conflict. His experience during a time of upheaval in England influenced his thoughts and beliefs. All of his works concern the structure of society and legitimate government, and Leviathan is regarded as one of the earliest and most influential examples of social contract theory when it was written during the English Civil War (1642-1651). Hobbes believed that peace and effective rule could only be achieved through a strong central government. Leviathan argues for a social contract for the subjects through rule by an absolute sovereign. For example on page 164 in Chapter XXX Of the Office of the Soveraign Representative: Such as are Necessary: For the use of Lawes, (which are but Rules Authorised) is not to bind the People from all Voluntary actions; but to direct and keep them in such as motion, as not to hurt themselves by their own impetuous desires, rashnesse, or indiscretion, as Hedges are set, not to stop Travellers, but to keep them in the way. And therefore a Law that is not Needful, having not the true End of a Law, is not Good. A Law may be conceived to be Good, when it is for the benefit of the Soveraign; though it be not Necessary for the People; but it is not so. For the good of the Soveraign and People, cannot be separated. It is a weak Soveraign, that has weak subjects; and a weak People, whose Soveraign wanteth Power to rule them at his will. Unnecessary Lawes are not good Lawes; but trapps for Mony; which where the right of Soveraign Power is acknowledged, are superfluous; and where it is not acknowledged, unsufficient to defend the People. It is easy to see how Hobbes has clearly stated his case for central government and strong laws to serve as a bulwark against behavior that could lead to more societal upheaval (among others). As other reviewers have stated this is somewhat difficult reading as it was composed and remains in Old English. The syntax and organization may be different than what the reader may be used to. In the final analysis Leviathan supports the view that a person's moral and/or political obligations are dependent upon a contract or agreement among them to form the society in which they live. Five stars.

24 people found this helpful

Ritesh Laud

5.0 out of 5 stars Hobbes is a lot smarter than I am

Reviewed in the United States on July 5, 2004

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I finished reading Leviathan a couple months ago, but cringed every time I thought about writing a review. The book is large at over 700 pages and covers so much ground, a review would have to be a book in itself to do it justice. Due to Leviathan's philosophical content and somewhat antiquated language, it's very slow going. Each page needs time to digest.

So I'm not going to bother writing a real review. I will just say that Leviathan is a 5-star classic and worth your time, if you can deal with reading political philosophy. Hobbes divides the work into four major sections:

Of Man, in which he discusses human nature and why civilized people prefer peace to war. Here Hobbes establishes the primary reason that people form a government to rule over them: to safeguard them from enemies, both external and internal.

Of Common-wealth, in which Hobbes first talks about the several forms of government and the pros and cons of each. He then explains the rights that a government has over its people; according to Hobbes, the government can do pretty much anything it wants to. Finally he goes into the things that tend to weaken or dissolve a government.

Of a Christian Common-wealth, the longest section, in which Hobbes accepts the Bible as the word of God and quotes from it numerous time to bolster his position in support of a powerful government.

Of the Kingdome of Darknesse, the shortest and strangest section, in which Hobbes veers away from the topic of government and instead focuses on religious practices and beliefs of the day that he deems improper and inconsistent with the Bible.

It took me months to read this, but I came away with great respect for Hobbes and a better understanding of politics. I can't say that I agree with everything I read, but I think the majority of his arguments are sound and convincing.

Five stars, no doubt in my mind. But it's a dive into the deep end, so you'll probably only finish it if you really appreciate and enjoy philosophical discussion!

155 people found this helpful

Gary S

4.0 out of 5 stars An explanation of the interplay of secular governance and religious belief systems.

Reviewed in the United States on March 29, 2019

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My take-away from the first half of the book was that in order to maintain civil society, all citizens must adhere without objection to all laws and regulations of the whatever type of government be in power. This would be true for Monarchies, Aristocracies or Democracies. Since the individual is beholden to the sovereign government for their survival and not falling into chaos, they have no recourse but to obey absolutely, regardless of their religious beliefs.

The second half focuses on chapter/verses of the Old and New Testaments that support Hobbes' contention that the Church/clergy has no real governing power but what is granted by the country's sovereign government. His other tangents describe the Catholic church's retention of gentile/Hellenistic rituals and idols, thereby diluting a reasoned/natural approach to the Church's teaching. His derision of Aristotle seems mainly based on a superficial analysis of the metaphysical word games played by philosophical persons living idle lifestyles.

Richmond

4.0 out of 5 stars Worth the Time

Reviewed in the United States on August 28, 2015

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Surprisingly easy to read and thought provoking. I shied away from reading non-fiction classics for a long time, but it has been fruitful to give them a go. Even with Leviathan there is plenty to think about and Hobbes explains everything clearly. The first half of the book is about political philosophy and the second half concerns itself with Christian doctrine. You can abridge the work by reading only the first half, which is what schools teach about the work that is relevant today, but I found the second half to be interesting, and informative on learning some of the thoughts on Christianity learned men, such as Hobbes, had considered. For instance, he makes a surprisingly rational case considering what we should trust from the Bible, as well as critical thinking on heaven, hell, and angels/demons. I say surprisingly because those of us who haven't taken the time to read the classics are ignorant to how well thought out are the arguments and weighty considerations of evidence.

Mike Stubbs

5.0 out of 5 stars Where it started.

Reviewed in the United States on February 14, 2022

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As someone who is interested in how we got to where we are today in Government, I'm interested in where we started and the thoughts and ideas that were both accepted and rejected to put us here today. So yes this was very interesting.

Ed Barto

VINE VOICE

3.0 out of 5 stars Great Content, Masterful Philosopher, Horrible Read

Reviewed in the United States on March 1, 2014

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If you could bifurcate the review, i would give 5 stars to Hobbes and his brilliant discourse on the need and virtues of absolute government, the need to have church subordinate to state, and the challenges of religion and ecclesiastical governance in general. Mind you, I don't agree with Hobbes on most of his points - especially the absolute government aspects - but find his thinking clear and cogent, well argued, and a fascinating read.

Unfortunately, that brilliance is clouded and pained by Penguin's translation of the text, which retains all of it's 17th Century English Charmme. Penguin thoughtfully left in all the 400+ year old spelling, grammar, capitalization and vocabulary that renders the text (already 700+ pages) a pretty ponderous read. The accessibility to the brilliance of the argument is masked by the need to translate into modern English. If this would only have been translated into modern English (and I believe some versions of Leviathan are), this would have been an extraordinary 5 star read.

Read Hobbes. In a modern translation. And if there isn't one, I might just have to do it myself...

9 people found this helpful

The Smiths

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting book

Reviewed in the United States on March 4, 2013

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The rating isn't for Hobbes, though I have to say there are a lot of things that I don't agree with so far and I'm a libertarian. Agreeing or disagreeing doesn't make a grade though.

This rating is for the version of the book with the bicycle on the cover done by Bibilolife.

The reason for 3 stars is because by the time I'd gotten to Chapter 2 the binding had separated from the spine and the book was flopping all over the place. It was promptly replaced and they sent me a new one before I had to return the old one and shipping was paid and I just used the box the new one came in. Which was nice. But the book binding is still cheap though and it seems in a way more fragile than a paperback copy.

Second problem, I've found multiple obvious incorrect spellings (not archaic spellings, but missed letters by the editor/publisher) and typos in the book. Again, doesn't reflect on Hobbes, but does on Bibliolife.

Hey Bibliolife! I have a degree in English and experience in editing if you want a new editor!

One person found this helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Great and difficult read

Reviewed in the United States on November 8, 2010

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Someone gave this great book and seminal work in political philosophy 2 stars just because it is difficult to read. In fact, it is quite difficult to read. Partly because the Leviathan was written almost 400 years ago and partly because well, it is Hobbes. However, just because a book is hard to read does not mean that the content is bad or worthless. I would suggest the opposite, if our very simple thinking and poor intellectual abilities do not allow us to crack it open at the first attempt we should keep trying. That effort is what keep us moving forward.

Great book, needless to say. Take your time and enjoy. If it gets difficult just leave it on the table, think about it and read it later. This book is not your quick weekend read. It is a book with complex arguments and structure. Sit, read and ponder. Enjoy!

14 people found this helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars An Important Philosophy Book

Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2017

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Hobbes is an important author for a reason, and he makes interesting points in the Leviathon. While you do not want to take his advice to heart too much, he definitely makes one think about the human condition.

Dannyo81

5.0 out of 5 stars Letter to the King

Reviewed in the United States on May 22, 2014

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Understandably this book was written to the prince or king at the time of how to centralize power from monarchies to statehood. It is an insight to how the power structure operates and its intended goals. Follow this up with James Balko's, Rise of the Warrior Cop: the militarization of police power to catch a glimpse of where this philosophy has taken those who find themselves being ruled under these systems of thought carried into action. Law enforcement being an extension of state power, its is imperative to understand its basic construct!

Leviathan: Conclusion Summary & Analysis 

LifeChart Review and Concultions Chapter 47

https://www.litcharts.com/lit/leviathan/a-review-and-conclusion

Summary

Analysis

Sound reasoning is necessary in all discourse and discussion. Without reason, one’s conclusions are hasty and unfair. Powerful Eloquence is also necessary, without which reason has very little effect. According to Hobbes, Reason, and Eloquence can stand together, which is what he hopes he has done in writing this book. Regarding the Laws of Nature that Hobbes explains early in the book, he would like to also add that everyone is obligated by Nature to protect during war the same sovereign power they are protected by in peacetime. 

In Hobbes’s review and conclusion, he quickly recaps his most important arguments and adds to them. A philosopher must be articulate and express their theories with eloquence, which is what Hobbes has attempted to do in Leviathan. Hobbes’s addition here of a subject’s obligation to protect their sovereign power again implies that a sovereign cannot be overthrown by subjects in a civil war.

Nature, War, and Civil Society Power, Common-wealths, and Monarchies Theme Icon

Religion Theme Icon Reason, Fact, and Philosophy  And, due to some recently printed books about the English Civil War, Hobbes wants to remind everyone that a subject is obliged to a conqueror when—and only when—that subject freely submits to that conqueror and agrees to be their subject. A conquest is not victory in war; a conquest is winning power over the subjects of another sovereign power. Thus, if one is killed, they are not conquered, nor are they conquered if they are held prisoner in chains.

Here, Hobbes implies that those English subjects who did not support the English Civil War are not automatically beholden to the sovereign power instituted by the parliamentarians. As this government was not instituted through a covenant with the people, it is illegitimate.

Power, Common-wealths, and Monarchies Theme Icon

In Chapter 29, Hobbes discusses the causes of the dissolution of a common-wealth, to which he would like add that people will always justify the war that brings their power. A tyrant is nothing more than a name for a sovereign power, whether that power is one person or many people. Hobbes believes that to tolerate a hatred of tyranny is simply to tolerate a hatred of common-wealths, and he argues it is another evill seed on the maintenance of civil society.

Hobbes has demonstrated that the Jews and God entered into a covenant in which God was made their sovereign power by contract. The Jews were God’s Peculiar People and differed from others on Earth because God ruled them by consent, not by his natural power. In God’s Kingdome, Moses was Lieutenant on Earth and was appointed by God to punish those who broke the rules.

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Read – 1 Thessalonians 5:23 Amplified Bible (AMP) ²³Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you through and through [ that is, separate you from profane and vulgar things, make you pure and whole and undamaged—consecrated to Him—set apart for His purpose ]; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept complete and [be found ] blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

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What does it mean that Jesus and believers are living stones in 1 Peter 2:4-5?

THE TERM LIVING STONES in 1 Peter 2:5 is used as a metaphor to illustrate the secure and intimate relationship believers have with Jesus, who is described in the previous verse as the living Stone (1 Peter 2:4). Together, these two verses picture how Christ and His followers are joined by God Himself: As you come to him, the living Stone—rejected by men but chosen by God and precious to Him—you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ (1 Peter 2:4–5).

The foundation of God’s building is His Son, Jesus Christ, the living Stone. The living stones, in turn, are believers who come to Jesus and place their lives upon this foundation. The living Stone is precious to those who believe (1 Peter 2:7), but some men reject the living Stone in order to build their lives their own way, not God’s way (see Psalm 118:22 and Luke 6:46–49). Unbelievers cast this living Stone aside, not caring that Jesus is the only true foundation upon which they can build securely (1 Corinthians 3:11).

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