Thomas Hobbes: The Philosopher Who Engineered the State from Fear

Key Points of This Article

• The State of Nature and the “War of All Against All”: Hobbes depicted the condition without political authority as a “war of every man against every man” (bellum omnium contra omnes). Human beings are roughly equal in bodily power, and from that equality spring competition, distrust, and the hunger for glory—producing a constant danger of violence. Developed in Chapter 13 of Leviathan, it is the most famous thought experiment in the history of modern political philosophy.
• The Social Contract and Sovereignty: To escape the terror of the state of nature, individuals contract with one another, transferring their rights to a single person (or assembly). The sovereign thus created holds absolute power, and subjects owe obedience. The turning point at which the legitimacy of power was grounded not in God but in human agreement.
• Mechanistic View of Human Nature and Materialism: Hobbes regarded human beings as sophisticated machines. Sensation is nothing but the motion of external bodies transmitted through the nerves to the brain; desire and aversion are explained as minute internal motions. This thoroughgoing materialism undergirds his political theory and imported the methods of modern natural science into the study of humanity and society.

Life and Historical Context

Born April 5, 1588, at Westport (near present-day Malmesbury) in Wiltshire, southwestern England. His father was a country vicar who got into a fistfight with another clergyman at the church door and then vanished. Hobbes was taken in and raised by an uncle who was a glove-maker. Later, in a verse autobiography written in Latin, Hobbes recorded: “My mother gave birth to twins: myself and fear.” The story was that his mother, terrified by news of the approaching Spanish Armada, had delivered him prematurely. Exaggeration or not, the fact that this thinker bound fear to his own birth already reveals his temperament.

At fourteen he entered Magdalen Hall, Oxford. He received a schooling in Scholastic philosophy but was not satisfied. He is said to have spent more time gazing at atlases than reading logic textbooks. In 1608 he graduated with a degree and became tutor to the young head of the Cavendish family (later the Earls of Devonshire). This connection lasted the whole of Hobbes’s life, providing him with financial security and an intellectual environment. Surrounded by a nobleman’s library and able to accompany his patrons on European tours, Hobbes—who never held a university post—found an irreplaceable school.

In 1629 Hobbes published an English translation of Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War. It was a history of how Athenian democracy had blundered into a ruinous war. Hobbes must have seen his own England reflected in its pages: the peril of a politics whipped by popular passion, the process by which demagogues inflame the crowd and sober judgment is lost. In his preface Hobbes hailed Thucydides as “the most politic historiographer that ever writ” and praised his exposure of democracy’s weakness. The seeds of the later political philosophy were already sown in this work of translation.

Between the 1610s and 1630s Hobbes made three European tours as a tutor. The third (1634–1636) proved decisive. In Paris he joined the intellectual circle of Father Marin Mersenne, exchanging ideas with Descartes and Gassendi. In Florence he visited the aged Galileo. There he encountered the mechanistic philosophy that explains the world through motion and body alone, and conceived the idea of extending it to the problems of humanity and the state.

In 1640 he fled to Paris. In 1642 he published De Cive (On the Citizen), and in 1651 Leviathan appeared in London. Yet this work made enemies on every side. Royalists were outraged that he had grounded sovereignty in contract rather than divine right. The Church was furious that he had placed religion under the sovereign’s jurisdiction. Unable to remain in Paris, Hobbes returned to England late in 1651 and submitted to Cromwell’s regime. By the logic of his own theory, the power that effectively maintains order is the legitimate sovereign, so this was a consistency of theory and action.

After the Restoration of 1660, Charles II—grateful to the man who had once taught him mathematics—granted Hobbes a pension. Parliament, however, investigated Hobbes’s writings for atheism, and after the Great Fire of London in 1666 his books were singled out as a possible cause of divine wrath. Under publication restrictions Hobbes kept writing. At eighty-seven he published an English translation of Homer’s Odyssey; the following year, at eighty-eight, the Iliad. He died on December 4, 1679, aged ninety-one. His last words are reported to have been: “I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.”

Mini Timeline

• 1588: Born in Wiltshire, England (the year of the Spanish Armada)
• 1603: Enters Magdalen Hall, Oxford
• 1608: Graduates; becomes tutor to the Cavendish family
• 1629: Publishes English translation of Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War
• 1634–36: Third European tour. Joins the Mersenne Circle; visits Galileo
• 1640: Flees to Paris. The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic circulated in manuscript
• 1642: De Cive published. English Civil War begins
• 1646: Teaches mathematics to the exiled Prince Charles (the future Charles II)
• 1649: Execution of Charles I
• 1651: Leviathan published. Returns to England
• 1655: De Corpore (On the Body) published
• 1658: De Homine (On Man) published
• 1679, December 4: Dies at Hardwick Hall, Devonshire, aged 91

What Did This Philosopher Ask?

Before Hobbes, the ground of political authority was sought in God. Kings received power from God. The Church, in its spiritual authority, transcended secular power. In the tradition running from Aristotle, the human being was a “political animal” (zōon politikon) whose nature found its fulfilment only inside a community. The state arose naturally. Thomas Aquinas derived natural law from divine law and located the secular order within the eternal order. Politics was part of the cosmic order, not something human beings designed on their own.

Hobbes stripped all of this away. Human beings are not political by nature. Communities do not arise naturally; they are made artificially. What makes them is fear and calculation. What human beings naturally seek is not the good but safety, not virtue but survival. In the dedicatory epistle of De Cive Hobbes wrote: “I deny that man is fitted by nature for society.” It was a quiet declaration of war on two thousand years of tradition.

The Introduction to Leviathan reads: “Nature, the art whereby God hath made and governs the world, is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an artificial animal. . . . For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE, in Latin CIVITAS, which is but an artificial man.” The frontispiece of the first edition depicts a giant whose body is composed of countless tiny human figures, holding a sword in one hand and a bishop’s crozier in the other, gazing down from a hilltop over a city. An artificial giant bearing the authority of both the secular and the sacred. The state is not a product of nature; it is a machine that human beings engineer. This conceptual shift opened the door to modern political philosophy.

Core Theory

1. Mechanistic View of Human Nature: The Human Being as a Sophisticated Machine

Part I of Leviathan, “Of Man,” begins not with political theory but with an account of human nature. What is sensation? An external body presses on a sense organ, its motion travels through the nerves to the brain, and perception arises as the counter-pressure from brain to heart (Ch. 1). Colour, sound, and taste do not reside in the object; they are phenomena generated through the sense organs. Imagination is decaying sense (Ch. 2), thought is a train of imaginations (Ch. 3), and speech is the art of pinning names to thoughts (Ch. 4). As Galileo had explained celestial motion by mechanics, so Hobbes proposed to explain the human mind by motion and body.

Appetite and aversion are nothing but the direction of minute motions within the body. Motion toward an object is appetite; motion away from it is aversion. “Good” is simply the name of what a person desires; “evil” is the name of what a person shuns (Ch. 6). There is no objective standard of good and evil. Here there is no Platonic Form of the Good, no Aristotelian teleology. There is only motion and body. When you give up your seat on a crowded morning train, we call it “good.” But for Hobbes it is aversion to the sight of another’s discomfort, or desire for the goodwill of strangers—not a brush with heavenly goodness.

From this view of human nature a consequence follows. Human beings are creatures of perpetual desire. “There is no such thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind, while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire” (Ch. 6). Felicity is not a destination but a ceaseless passage from one desire to the next. Stop moving and you die. That is why human beings seek power without end. “I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death” (Ch. 11). The desire for power is not a vice. It is a condition of survival.

2. The State of Nature: War of All Against All

Chapter 13 of Leviathan. The most read and most contested chapter in modern political philosophy. Hobbes constructed a thought experiment: the state of nature—the condition in which no common power exists.

The starting point is equality. It may come as a surprise, but Hobbes begins from human equality. Not equality of rights, however. Equality in the capacity to kill. “The weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself” (Ch. 13). A sleeping giant can be brained with a stone by a child. Anyone can be killed by anyone. From this cold recognition Hobbes’s argument sets in motion.

From this equality arise three causes of conflict. First, competition: when two people want the same thing and both cannot have it, they become enemies. Second, diffidence: since you never know when the other will strike, a pre-emptive attack becomes the rational choice. Third, glory: if you are insulted and do not retaliate, you invite further contempt; you must maintain a reputation for strength or become a target. Think of a petty boundary dispute between neighbours. Remove the third party who arbitrates, and ask how far the resentment would swell. Hobbes pushed the logic to its limit.

“In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation . . . no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Those five adjectives are probably the most famous in the history of political philosophy.

Hobbes did not, however, present the state of nature as historical fact. He explicitly noted: “I believe it was never generally so, over all the world.” It was a logical deduction. What would happen if common power vanished? But Hobbes did not forget illustration. He pointed to the lives of Native Americans (as he understood them), to England during the civil war, and to the relations among sovereign states. Because the international arena has no sovereign, nations stand permanently in a state of nature. And Hobbes turned to the reader’s own daily life: “Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his actions as I do by my words?” You arm yourself when you travel and lock the door when you sleep. Your behaviour shows you do not trust your neighbour.

3. The Right of Nature and the Laws of Nature

In the state of nature every person possesses the right of nature: the liberty to use all means available for the preservation of one’s own life. But this liberty is unlimited and therefore self-defeating. If everyone can do anything to everyone, no one’s safety is assured.

Here reason enters. A law of nature is a general rule discovered by reason. Hobbes enumerated nineteen laws of nature, but their core is compressed into the first three. The first law of nature: “Seek peace and follow it”—and only when peace cannot be obtained may one use all the advantages of war (Ch. 14). The second law of nature: “That a man be willing, when others are so too, as far forth as for peace and defence of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men as he would allow other men against himself.” And the third law of nature: “That men perform their covenants made” (Ch. 15). From this third law Hobbes derived the concept of justice. Justice is keeping covenants; injustice is breaking them. Before the covenant there is neither justice nor injustice.

The thread of the logic is clean. Fear drives human beings toward reason. Reason discovers the conditions of peace. Those conditions require each person to surrender part of the right of nature and submit to mutual restraint. But here lies a fundamental difficulty. Promises alone will not hold. “Covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all” (Ch. 17). Would every person in a workplace voluntarily obey a rule that carried no penalty? Hobbes did not trust human goodwill. Precisely because he did not trust it, he set out to design an institution.

4. The Social Contract and the Birth of Leviathan

Without a force to enforce covenants, covenants are empty words. That is why a common power is needed. Here Hobbes built the concept of the social contract. Each individual covenants with every other, declaring: “I authorise and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy right to him, and authorise all his actions in like manner” (Ch. 17).

The structure of the contract deserves attention. The covenant is made among the subjects themselves; the sovereign is not a party to it. The sovereign therefore cannot breach the covenant (having never entered into one). Nor can subjects accuse the sovereign of injustice (since every act of the sovereign was authorised by the subjects themselves). The logic is rigorous and, at the same time, terrifying. The enormous artificial person thus created is the Leviathan—named for the sea-monster in the Book of Job that has no equal upon earth. “Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear” (Job 41:33).

The sovereign’s power must be absolute, Hobbes argued. Divide power and you slide back into civil war. What happened when king and parliament shared power in England? Hobbes made his own country’s catastrophe his evidence. Legislation, judicature, executive authority, command of the military, taxation, censorship—all must rest in a single hand. There is no trace here of the separation of powers. On the contrary, the division of power is itself identified as the cause of civil war.

5. The Limits of Sovereignty: The Inalienable Right of Self-Preservation

Hobbes advocated absolute sovereignty, but he did not demand unconditional obedience. One right can never be transferred: the right of self-preservation. “A man cannot lay down the right of resisting them that assault him by force to take away his life” (Ch. 14). When the sovereign commands a subject to die, the subject has no obligation to comply. Since the state was created for the sake of self-preservation, if the state itself threatens self-preservation, the ground of obedience disappears.

Chapter 21, “Of the Liberty of Subjects,” explores this further. In areas where the law is silent, subjects are free to act as they please—buying, selling, choosing a dwelling, choosing what to eat, educating their children. Absolute sovereignty does not mean the sovereign commands everything. It means that when a command is issued, there exists no legitimate means of challenge.

When the sovereign loses the ability to protect, the subject’s obligation of obedience also ceases (Ch. 21). “The end of obedience is protection” (Ch. 30). No protection, no obedience. Here lies the logic by which Hobbes justified his submission to Cromwell’s regime. The power that effectively protects is the legitimate power—not a matter of bloodline or dynastic legitimacy. A commonwealth by conquest and a commonwealth by institution alike compel obedience by the same motive: fear (Ch. 20).

6. Religion and the State: A Critique of the “Kingdom of Darkness”

Leviathan is a four-part work. Parts III and IV—“Of a Christian Commonwealth” and “Of the Kingdom of Darkness”—occupy roughly half the book. Modern readers tend to skip them, but for Hobbes they were the crux, because the single greatest engine of the seventeenth-century civil wars was religion. Puritan preachers incited resistance to the king from the pulpit; Catholic priests placed loyalty to the Pope above secular law. Hobbes targeted both.

His argument ran thus: if religious authority stands alongside secular power, subjects will not know which master to obey. “No man can serve two masters.” Therefore the right to interpret Scripture belongs to the sovereign. It is the state, not the church, that determines what Scripture means. Hobbes read the Bible with painstaking care and demonstrated that nowhere in Scripture is the Pope granted temporal power. He labelled papal temporal authority the “Kingdom of Darkness” and denounced the metaphysics of Scholastic philosophy as “vain philosophy.” Both Catholics and Protestants hated him for it.

Yet within this framework a reservation remains: the freedom of conscience. Hobbes acknowledged faith as an interior matter. The sovereign determines the outward form of worship, but what a person believes in the silence of the heart cannot be compelled. “Faith is internal and invisible; it has therefore no place among the actions of the body politic” (Ch. 42). Obey the sovereign in public; pray freely within. That a small window of liberty of conscience was left inside the steel logic of absolute sovereignty—and how vastly that window would later be thrown open—Hobbes himself may not have foreseen.

7. Philosophy of Language: The Abuse of Words Breeds Conflict

Hobbes is usually discussed only as a political philosopher, but his analysis of language is equally sharp. In Chapters 4 and 5 of Leviathan he catalogued four abuses of speech: using words whose meanings are unstable, taking metaphors literally, using words to disguise one’s intentions, and using words to wound. Hobbes treated reasoning (reasoning) as a species of calculation (reckoning). Define names precisely and then add and subtract according to those definitions. Let ambiguity creep in and the calculation goes awry.

“Justice,” “liberty,” “rights.” People use these words with different meanings and, though they utter the same words, reach no agreement. When the word “fairness” comes up at a family dinner table, are parent and child pointing at the same thing? The problem echoes Francis Bacon’s Idols of the Marketplace, but Hobbes positioned it as a direct cause of political conflict. The authority to fix the definitions of words also belongs to the sovereign. What counts as justice is decided not by individual conscience but by the sovereign’s law. A suffocating conclusion. But Hobbes would retort: when each person raised his own banner of “justice” and refused to yield, what happened?

Guide to Major Works

• Leviathan (1651): Hobbes’s masterwork. A four-part structure moving from the theory of man to the theory of the state to the theory of religion. Written in English, with a Latin edition following in 1668. The indispensable classic of political philosophy. Standard scholarly edition: ed. Noel Malcolm, 3 vols., Clarendon Press, 2012.
• De Cive (On the Citizen, 1642): The prototype of Leviathan’s political theory. Written in Latin, it circulated across Europe. The theories of the state of nature, natural law, and sovereignty are already clearly set out.
• The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (circulated in manuscript 1640; published 1650): Hobbes’s first systematic political treatise. Written in English and concise. A good starting point for newcomers.
• De Corpore (On the Body, 1655): Hobbes’s natural philosophy. It sets out the mechanistic worldview grounded in motion and body, and reveals the ambition to build philosophy on geometry.
• Behemoth (published 1679; written c. 1668): A dialogue analysing the history and causes of the English Civil War. A record of Hobbes applying his theory to history, with a distinctive flavour of its own.

Major Criticisms and Controversies

The backlash from contemporaries was fierce. Bishop Bramhall denounced Leviathan as atheism and engaged Hobbes in a prolonged controversy over free will. Hobbes denied free will, arguing that human actions are determined by a chain of antecedent causes. In 1683 Oxford University consigned Leviathan and De Cive to a public book-burning.

John Locke, in the Two Treatises of Government (1689), overturned Hobbes’s conclusions wholesale while studiously avoiding naming him. Locke’s state of nature is not war but a condition of peace governed by natural law. Human beings possess natural rights to life, liberty, and property, and if a government violates those rights, the people have a right to resist. Here the fork between constitutionalism and absolute sovereignty appears. Locke was refuting Hobbes, yet he used the very framework—state of nature to social contract—that Hobbes had established. He inherited the form of the question and changed only the answer.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau objected from a different angle. Was Hobbes’s state of nature not simply socialised man stripped naked? Are competition, distrust, and the hunger for glory natural attributes, or habits planted by society? (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, 1755.) Rousseau wrote: “Hobbes did not see that the same cause which prevents the savages from using their reason . . . prevents them also from abusing their faculties.” He meant that Hobbes had drawn a picture of civilised man and called it natural man. The criticism has force. Even granting that Hobbes’s state of nature is a thought experiment rather than a history, the question remains: is the model of human nature it presupposes universal, or a reflection of seventeenth-century England? The question is still open.

In the twentieth century Carl Schmitt re-evaluated Hobbes (The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, 1938). Schmitt argued that by leaving the freedom of private conscience intact, Hobbes had opened a fatal crack in the Leviathan. The moment private belief was acknowledged, the distinction between public and private was born, and it would ultimately hollow out the state. Schmitt himself collaborated with the Nazi regime, so his reading is itself charged with political tension.

Influence and Legacy

Hobbes changed the very form of the question that political philosophy asks. After Hobbes, political philosophy could no longer avoid the question: why is power legitimate? The social-contract tradition running through Locke, Rousseau, and Kant all inherited Hobbes’s problem-setting. John Rawls’s “original position” in A Theory of Justice (1971) can be read as a variation on Hobbes’s state of nature.

In international relations theory, Hobbes is invoked as the founding figure of realism. Among sovereign states there is no sovereign. The international arena is therefore a state of nature. States prioritise their own security above all else, and the only reliable check is a balance of power. The international-political theories of Hans Morgenthau and Kenneth Waltz rest on the bedrock of Hobbes’s state of nature.

In legal philosophy, Hobbes is regarded as a forerunner of legal positivism. Law is the command of the sovereign, not the law of nature or the will of God. John Austin’s command theory (nineteenth century) and H. L. A. Hart’s The Concept of Law (1961) stand on a line extending from Hobbes’s question.

His influence extends beyond philosophy. The Prisoner’s Dilemma in game theory is structurally identical to Hobbes’s state of nature. When every individual acts rationally, the outcome is the worst for all. Without a third party to enforce cooperation (the sovereign, in Hobbes’s terms), rational individuals will not cooperate. The homeowners’ association where no one wants to clean the common areas is a miniature version of the same structure.

Connections to the Present

In the immediate aftermath of a disaster—power out, water gone, police unable to function—what happens? In most cases people help each other. But looting also occurs. Order sits on thin ice. The moment Hobbes’s question comes vividly alive is the moment order wavers. A blacked-out city at night, a disaster zone where government has collapsed, a space beyond the reach of law. Hobbes confronted us, four hundred years ago, with how fragile order is and how great a price its maintenance exacts. Walking alone at night without fear. Finding a lost wallet at the police station. These are not gifts of nature; they are the products of an order that someone maintains.

International society still closely resembles Hobbes’s state of nature. The United Nations lacks a sovereign’s power. Security Council resolutions are gutted by vetoes; treaties lack enforcement mechanisms. When one nation invades another, what deters it is not morality but the balance of power. “Covenants, without the sword, are but words.” That single sentence quietly surveys the fragility of international law.

The trade-off between liberty and security has not vanished either. How much surveillance do we accept for the sake of public safety? How far can freedom of movement be restricted to contain a pandemic? How strict should school rules be? Hobbes would answer: without security there is no liberty. But we must press the question back: does the liberty surrendered for the sake of security ever actually return?

Questions for the Reader

• If the police stopped functioning in your city for a week, what would happen? Is Hobbes’s state of nature a fantasy, or a glimpse of a reality that surfaces whenever order disappears?
• What freedoms would you be willing to surrender for the sake of security? If you had to draw a line, on what grounds would you draw it?
• Does the international community need a “Leviathan”? If something like a world government were actually realised, would it bring peace, or would it generate a different kind of violence?

References

• (Primary text): Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm, 3 vols., Clarendon Press, 2012. (Oxford standard text.)
• (Primary text, accessible edition): Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck, Cambridge University Press, revised edition, 1996.
• (Study): Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, Cambridge University Press, 2008.
• (Study): Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, Clarendon Press, 2002.
• (Biography): A. P. Martinich, Hobbes: A Biography, Cambridge University Press, 1999.
• (Study): Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• (Study): Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition, Cambridge University Press, 1986.
• (Study): Richard Tuck, Hobbes: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2002.
• (Reference): “Thomas Hobbes,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.