Review of Leviathan (1651)

Thomas Hobbes (writer).

Read in 2025.

I read Rod Hay’s 1999 edition and that’s what I’m quoting from. Hobbes’s original spelling and orthography are closer to Shakespeare and the King James Bible.

This is the English Civil War’s answer to Plato’s Republic (ca. 375 BCE). It is more idealistic than The Prince (1513/1532), but less so than Plato, and much less so than medieval political theory.

Hobbes’s work is Christian. The last two of Leviathan’s four volumes are full of biblical exegesis, which brings down my rating. He often references The Bible (ca. 110 CE) even in the first two volumes, but Hobbes represents Protestant intellectuals in service to an increasingly secular apparatus of government at the height of the Scientific Revolution. He avoids many earlier Christian assumptions about original sin and divine providence. With gods too distant to govern society, Hobbes instead tried to figure things out from his rudimentary beliefs about human nature and logic, quite like Plato’s Socrates. For example, Hobbes believed that everyone has certain rights—such as the right to self-defence—which cannot be contracted away, because no rational actor would ever give up that right. It’s an attempt to build a utopia out of rational interest and to move toward that utopia from Cicero’s question, “cui bono”. Importantly, Hobbes rejected the old assumption that all people share the same goals and interests (chapter 11). He saw too much diversity in human nature and knowledge for there to be one “greatest good” for all, but at the same time, he rejected Plato’s and Aristotle’s notions of personal suitability for a given role in society:

The question who is the better man has no place in the condition of mere nature, where (as has been shown before) all men are equal. The inequality that now is has been introduced by the laws civil. I know that Aristotle in the first book of his Politics, for a foundation of his doctrine, maketh men by nature, some more worthy to command, meaning the wiser sort, such as he thought himself to be for his philosophy; others to serve, meaning those that had strong bodies, but were not philosophers as he; as master and servant were not introduced by consent of men, but by difference of wit: which is not only against reason, but also against experience. For there are very few so foolish that had not rather govern themselves than be governed by others: nor when the wise, in their own conceit, contend by force with them who distrust their own wisdom, do they always, or often, or almost at any time, get the victory.

In his interpretation of The Bible, Hobbes uses Mark 12:17, saying you should serve both Yahweh and Caesar, but also Matthew 6:24, saying you should not serve two masters, such as Yahweh and Caesar. Thematically, the paradox between these biblical passages (“places”) is central to Hobbes’s project, but he does not acknowledge that. Treating the problem that Jesus evidently had a false belief in demons possessing people, Hobbes eventually throws his hands in the air and pretends that the quality of the text does not matter: “But such questions as these are more curious than necessary for a Christian man’s salvation.”

Based on his correct understanding that the Christian gods are not observable or prone to intervene, that the authors of The Bible apparently contradict one another and logic and reality, that people have different interests and no destinies, and that England had descended into civil war when two factions grappled for control of the government, you might think that Hobbes would reject The Bible or be skeptical of the concentration of power under some fallible guy with a crown. Instead, to replace The Bible in his most fundamental arguments, Hobbes frequently returns to a poorly supported assumption that the natural condition of humankind is “the war of all against all”. He believed that people are non-cooperative by default, like Moses’s petulant Hebrews lost in the mythical desert:

In such condition 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, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

In reality, before the state was invented, and before the myth of Adam and Eve is set in the biblical chronology of the world, people already had agriculture, monumental architecture, other arts, and explorers on every continent. Animal husbandry, which brought many of our endemic diseases through zoonosis, probably did more to shorten our lives than war, though the Yamnaya culture had both in the early Bronze Age. It is true that literal violence per capita was more common in prehistoric societies, especially when resources became scarce, but they were societies. Hobbes did not know that society is older than apes, but he really should have known from observation that mammals are rarely solitary. Writing in a time of literal war is no excuse for his edgelord assumptions.

Underneath Hobbes’s understanding of universal war, there is a sketch toward something like the 1950s prisoner’s dilemma. Hobbes believes that fear of punishment by a strong government will disincentivize betrayal for personal gain, and that this can be done by fair contract. He does not actually complete this thought to resolve Juvenals’s problem of “watching the watchmen”, nor of corruption in general, but the sketch has influenced the theory of government and is therefore fun to read. Incidentally, in the passage quoted above, Hobbes argues against anarchy on the basis of continual fear, as if he thought continual fear was bad, but this is part of an argument for the state on the basis that a good state holds people together through “the terror of some punishment greater than the benefit they expect by the breach of their covenant”. Like Machiavelli, Hobbes is basically pragmatic but awful in his servility. In the end, he fuses his rationalism both with his religious faith and with his political theory:

The laws of God therefore are none but the laws of nature, whereof the principal is that we should not violate our faith, that is, a commandment to obey our civil sovereigns, which we constituted over us by mutual pact one with another.

He does not subscribe to deontological ethics. For example, he writes:

Covetousness of great riches, and ambition of great honours, are honourable; as signs of power to obtain them. Covetousness, and ambition of little gains, or preferments, is dishonourable.

That is, the greed of the rich is good, but the smaller greed typical of a humble person is bad. He says this while also acknowledging that the powerful naturally lust for more power. There is almost as much sophistry and pseudophilosophy in Hobbes’s logic as you would find in earlier political theory, but there is also honesty. For example, later on, he includes covetousness among the passions that we all know are conducive to crime and have innate drivers:

As for the passions, of hate, lust, ambition, and covetousness, what crimes they are apt to produce is so obvious to every man’s experience and understanding as there needeth nothing to be said of them, saving that they are infirmities, so annexed to the nature, both of man and all other living creatures, as that their effects cannot be hindered but by extraordinary use of reason, or a constant severity in punishing them. For in those things men hate, they find a continual and unavoidable molestation; whereby either a man’s patience must be everlasting, or he must be eased by removing the power of that which molesteth him: the former is difficult; the latter is many times impossible without some violation of the law.

This is wiser than “On Anger” (ca. 45 CE). When he is at his very best, Hobbes anticipates both the idea of self-serving cognitive biases and the bad influence they have on long-term planning, which is the central problem in politics:

For all men are by nature provided of notable multiplying glasses (that is their passions and self-love) through which every little payment appeareth a great grievance, but are destitute of those prospective glasses (namely moral and civil science) to see afar off the miseries that hang over them and cannot without such payments be avoided.

Accordingly, he deprecrates revenge (chapter 15). Even in his hateful Christian sectarianism, wherein atheists “are to be understood as enemies”, Hobbes tip-toes near the plausible idea that a government might be needed to guarantee public education against superstition, which would safeguard his metaphorical prospective glasses:

But if he [---] give away the government of doctrines, men will be frighted into rebellion with the fear of spirits.

When he’s not deep in the weeds of theology or legal argument, Hobbes is a charming iconoclast.

References here: The Ego and Its Own (1844), Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979).

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