Thomas Hobbes

 

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)

Hobbes's Quotations

"Life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

"The condition of man... is a condition of war of everyone against everyone."

"Fear and I were born twins together."

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HOBBES

Thomas Hobbes, born in 1588 in Westport, England, had a tumultuous childhood marked by his father's abandonment and was raised by his uncle, a successful manufacturer. Despite an early lack of familial emphasis on education, Hobbes was well-educated, attending Hertford College, Oxford, and later obtaining a BA from St. John's College, Cambridge. His career began as a tutor, which included travels across Europe and connections with prominent figures such as Charles II. By 1640, Hobbes shifted focus to philosophy, publishing "The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic," laying the groundwork for his later masterpiece, "Leviathan." His Royalist leanings forced him to flee to Paris during the English Civil War, where he continued his philosophical writings. Upon returning to England after the war, Hobbes became a noted intellectual, albeit controversial, leading to accusations of atheism by the House of Commons in 1666. Hobbes continued publishing abroad until his death in 1679 after a long and impactful career in philosophy.

"Liberty lieth in the silence of the law."

"Curiosity is the lust of the mind."

"Covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all."

Historical Context of Leviathan

In Leviathan, Hobbes briefly mentions the execution of King Charles I of England and the English Civil War (1642–1651), which pitted the Royalists (who supported the monarchy) against the Parliamentarians (who supported Parliament). Charles I was captured, tried, and found guilty of keeping tyrannical power over the people and was sentenced to death by beheading. After Charles I’s execution on January 30, 1649 began the period of the Interregnum, during which time England was ruled by Parliament, not the monarchy. In 1653, Oliver Cromwell (an English general who led the charge against Charles I and the Royalists) became Lord Protector, the head of state of the new British Protectorate. Under Cromwell’s rule during the Interregnum, Puritan views began to take hold in English society, which led to the suppression of Christian holidays, like Easter and Christmas. English citizens were expected to live a life of the utmost purity and piety, and forms of entertainment that were considered immoral and lewd, like gambling houses and theaters, were banned. Cromwell died in 1658, and his son, Richard, was appointed Lord Protector.

 

Richard, however, was a poor leader and politician, and the Protectorate ended in 1659. The monarchy was restored in England when Charles I’s son, Charles II, came out of exile in Europe and took back the crown in 1660.

 

Hobbes’s Concept of Natural Law

 

Whereas Augustine, Aquinas, and other Christian thinkers conceived of the natural law as the moral law of God.

Thomas Hobbes, construed the natural law as neither the law of God nor moral law. In fact, Hobbes’s conception of natural law amounted to discarding the older religious concept.

Hobbes did not speak of the natural law in the singular, as did the classical and Church philosophers, but of natural laws in the plural. These, for Hobbes, were simply rational principles of prudent action, prescriptions for best preserving your own life. According to Hobbes, who was a naturalist and in this respect resembled Aristotle, there is no higher authority beyond nature that passes judgment on the morality or immorality of human deeds. You obey the laws of nature insofar as you act rationally, and insofar as you do not, you do not live long.

 

Hobbes’s first law of nature was to seek peace as far as you have any hope of obtaining it, and when you cannot obtain it, to use any means you can to defend yourself. As you can see, this “law” is indeed simply a prescription of rational self-interest.

 

It is easy to understand why Hobbes regarded this as the first law of nature. From Hobbes’s perspective, the question of how best to prolong one’s life was a pressing issue for most people. Historians emphasize the importance of the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century, which included the discoveries of Gilbert, Kepler, Galileo, Harvey, Boyle, Huygens, Newton, and others. The seventeenth century, in fact, reads like a Who’s Who of scientific discoverers. But most seventeenth-century Europeans, plain folk and ruling aristocrats alike, had never even heard of these discoveries, and even if they had, they would have considered them uninteresting and irrelevant. That is because the seventeenth century was a century of political chaos and brutal warfare both in England and on the Continent. The Thirty Years’ War, an ugly spectacle, happened during this century, and most Europeans were somewhat preoccupied with the safety of their skins. For most of them, the question of personal survival was of more than academic interest.

 

Hobbes’s second law was to be content, for the sake of peace and self-preservation, provided others are also content, with only so much liberty “against other men” as you would allow other men against yourself. And the third law was “that men perform the covenants they have made.” (A covenant is an agreement or contract, a compact.)

 

But nobody, Hobbes said, is so stupid as to live up to an agreement that turns out not to be in her or his own best interest. So, if you want people to live by their agreements, you have to make sure that they will suffer if they try to break them.

 

Have I got this straight? Plato said that if people aren't smart, they'll wind up voluntarily submitting to a strongman. Hobbes said that if people are smart, that's exactly what they'll do.

 

Yes. And Stalin said that Hobbes and Plato were both right.

 

This means you have to have some third power to enforce them. “Without the terror of some power to cause them to be observed,” Hobbes wrote, covenants are only words.

 

In light of these considerations, Hobbes concluded, if you apply the three “laws of nature” listed here to real-life situations, what they mean is this: For their own welfare, people should transfer both their collective strength and their right to use whatever is necessary to defend themselves to a sovereign power that will use the acquired power to compel all citizens to honor their commitments to one another and to live together peacefully. This is the best road to peace and security, according to Hobbes. Without this central power to make them honor their agreements and keep them in line, people live in a “state of nature,” a state of unbridled war of each against all, a state of chaos, mistrust, deception, meanness, and violence in which each person stops at nothing to gain the upper hand, and life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

 

The central sovereign power to which people will transfer their power and rights, if they are smart enough to see that it is in their own self-interest to do so, was called by Hobbes the Leviathan. (A leviathan is a sea monster often symbolizing evil in the Old Testament and Christian literature.) When people transfer their power and rights to the Leviathan, they in effect create a social contract. It is this contract that delivers people from the evils of the natural state to civil society and a state of peace.

 

The social contract is thus an agreement between individuals who, for the sake of peace, are willing to make this absolutely unconditional and irrevocable transfer of right and power to the sovereign, or Leviathan.

 

According to Hobbes, only when people have contracted among themselves and created the Leviathan is there law or justice, and Hobbes was speaking of civil laws, not natural laws. Justice and injustice Hobbes defined as the keeping and the breaking of covenants. Because covenants and laws are meaningless unless there is a Leviathan to enforce them, law and justice can exist only under a Leviathan.

 

Now, the original social covenant, or contract, that creates the Leviathan is not a contract between the Leviathan and its subjects, Hobbes stressed. It is a contract among the subjects themselves. There is not and cannot be any covenant between the Leviathan and its subjects. Here is why: because the Leviathan holds all the power, it would be free to break any pledge, promise, agreement, commitment, contract, or covenant that it made. And that means that a covenant between the Leviathan and its subjects would be unenforceable and hence would be empty words.

 

Therefore, because logically there cannot be any covenant between the Leviathan and its subjects, and because justice is defined by Hobbes as the keeping of a covenant, it is impossible for the Hobbesian sovereign or Leviathan to act unjustly toward its subjects. Likewise, the Leviathan’s laws—and the Leviathan’s laws are the only laws, for they alone can be enforced—cannot be unjust. The Leviathan, according to Hobbes, has the right to lay down any laws it can enforce (although, as you will see shortly, it cannot require us to take our own lives), and we are not only physically but also morally obliged to obey them, for only through its laws are we kept from anarchy.

 

That no covenant exists between the Leviathan and its subjects means that the Leviathan has no legal or moral obligation to them. That it has no legal or moral obligation to its subjects means that they are gambling when they agree among themselves unconditionally to transfer all power and rights to it; they are gambling that life under its rule (conditions of “peace”) will be better than it would be under the conditions of anarchy that otherwise would obtain. Perhaps a rational sovereign is likely to see that it is not in his own self-interest to destroy or abuse his subjects, but there is always a chance that he will not.

 

Hobbes, obviously, thought the gamble a wise one. Were people to live without a common power, he wrote, a power “to keep them all in awe,” their innate viciousness

 

would preclude development of any commerce, industry, or culture, and there would be “no knowledge on the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society.” There would be only, he wrote, “continual fear, and danger of violent death.” In Hobbes’s view, given the alternatives of anarchy and dictatorship (the Leviathan) — and these are the only alternatives—the most reasonable choice is dictatorship, even though it does involve the risk of despotism.

 

Hobbes did make the political establishment of the Leviathan subject to certain minimal safeguards for its subjects. If the Leviathan fails to provide security to its subjects, they may transfer their allegiance to another sovereign. Further, because no one has the right to take his own life, this right is not among those transferred to the Leviathan at the time of the social contract of its subjects. Therefore, the Leviathan cannot rightfully compel a subject to take his or her own life.

 

Critics of Hobbes, not surprisingly, scoff at such “safeguards.” As a practical matter, the Leviathan, having been given the collective power of its subjects, is able to do whatever it pleases with its subjects. As John Locke said, with Hobbes you trade the chance of being ravaged by a thousand men acting independently for the chance of suffering the same fate at the hands of one person who has a thousand men at his command.

 

One other important concept in Hobbes’s political philosophy needs to be mentioned here: Hobbes used the phrase natural right and asserted that, when peace cannot be obtained, we have a natural right to use all means to defend ourselves. Today we think of a natural right as something that it would be immoral for others to deprive us of. For example, when we say that a person has a natural right to life, we mean that it would be wrong for others to deprive the person of life. For Hobbes the emphasis was slightly different. He meant that, when peace cannot be obtained, we suffer no moral restrictions whatsoever and that, if necessary for survival, each person can use any method he or she wants—including depriving another of his or her life. For Hobbes, one’s natural right to life does not prohibit any activity.

 

We have spent some time here on Hobbes. This is because Hobbes, in basing the creation and power of the Leviathan on a social contract, was the first philosopher to enunciate systematically the concept that the state, and with it justice, is created through an agreement or “contract” among the people whom the state comprises. This is, of course, a familiar notion to Americans because the United States Constitution, about which more will be said later, is the social contract that brought this country into existence.

 

So Hobbes really did more than reject the principle of natural law as representing God’s will and its corollary that the laws of the state and the state itself derive their legitimacy from their harmony with this divine natural law. According to Hobbes, the legitimacy of the state and its laws derives from an initial consent of those governed (though keep in mind that this consent is “required” by those principles of practical reason that Hobbes referred to as natural laws). With Hobbes began an important tradition in Western political philosophy, so-called contractualism. Contractualism is the idea that the legitimacy of the state and/or the principles of sound justice derive their legitimacy from a societal agreement or social contract. Contractarianism is often used as a synonym. You will encounter other contractarian theories besides Hobbes’s as we proceed, beginning with the philosophy of John Locke.