Leviathan

Summary

Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil was published in London in 1651, two years after the execution of Charles I, and its famous frontispiece shows a giant crowned sovereign whose body is made of hundreds of tiny subjects, holding a sword and a bishop's crozier above a peaceful town. The Introduction states the governing analogy: as art can make automata with springs for hearts and strings for nerves, so human art creates the commonwealth, an artificial man whose soul is sovereignty. Part I, 'Of Man', builds a mechanistic psychology from the ground up. Sensation is motion pressing on the organs, imagination is decaying sense, dreams are imaginations of sleepers, and thought is a train of images ordered by desire. Speech makes reason possible but also absurdity; science is accounting for names. Hobbes defines the passions as forms of appetite and aversion, defines madness as passion stronger than ordinary, and finds the root of religion in anxious fear of invisible powers. Felicity is not repose but continual progress of desire, and humanity shows a perpetual and restless desire of power after power that ceases only in death. Chapter XIII describes the natural condition of mankind without government: since people are roughly equal in ability to kill one another, competition, diffidence and glory produce a war of every man against every man, in which there is no industry, agriculture, arts or letters, and the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Reason discovers laws of nature, theorems of self-preservation, the first of which is to seek peace, the second to lay down one's right to all things if others will do the same. Covenants without the sword are but words, so people authorize a single person or assembly to bear their persons and act for them. Part II, 'Of Common-wealth', sets out the rights of this sovereign: undivided, unpunishable, controlling doctrine and censorship, militia, judicature and property. Subjects keep a narrow core of liberty, above all the right to resist those who come to kill or wound them. Hobbes compares the weaknesses that dissolve states to diseases of the body: divided sovereignty to epilepsy, the reading of Greek and Roman republican authors to the bite of a mad dog, monopolies to pleurisy. Parts III and IV, often skipped, occupy half the book. 'Of a Christian Common-wealth' reinterprets scripture to show that the sovereign is the supreme interpreter of religion and that prophecy and miracles have ceased. 'Of the Kingdome of Darknesse' attacks the papacy, scholastic Aristotelianism, belief in incorporeal spirits and demons, and the doctrine of purgatory as frauds by which clergy usurp civil power. A 'Review and Conclusion' defines when a subject may submit to a new conqueror, a doctrine read by contemporaries as justifying obedience to Cromwell.

Plot or Argument

• Introduction: the artificial man

  The state is likened to an automaton built by human art in imitation of the natural body, with sovereignty as its soul, magistrates as joints, reward and punishment as nerves, and counsellors as memory.

• Part I, Chs. I–XI: mechanical psychology

  Sense, imagination, dreams, trains of thought, speech, reason and the passions are derived from matter in motion. Chapter VIII treats wit and madness; Chapter XI treats the restless desire of power; Chapter XII traces religion to fear and ignorance of causes.

• Part I, Chs. XIII–XVI: state of nature and laws of nature

  Equality of vulnerability produces the war of all against all. Nineteen laws of nature, from seeking peace to equity and gratitude, follow from the right of self-preservation. Chapter XVI defines persons, authors and representation, the legal mechanism of the covenant.

• Part II, Chs. XVII–XXVIII: the sovereign and the subject

  The generation of the commonwealth by mutual covenant, the indivisible rights of sovereigns, kinds of commonwealth, paternal and despotic dominion, the liberty of subjects, public ministers, civil law, crimes and punishments.

• Part II, Chs. XXIX–XXXI: diseases and offices of the state

  Causes of dissolution described as bodily diseases, the duties of the sovereign (including public instruction and care of those unable to work), and the kingdom of God by nature.

• Part III: Of a Christian Commonwealth

  A long exegesis of scripture on prophecy, miracles, the kingdom of God and the church, arguing that the civil sovereign is head of the church and that only belief that Jesus is the Christ is necessary for salvation.

• Part IV and Review: the kingdom of darkness

  An attack on spiritual darkness caused by misreading scripture, demonology, vain philosophy and the self-interest of clergy; the Review states when obedience may be transferred to a conqueror.

Characters

• The sovereign (Leviathan), the artificial person

  The individual or assembly authorized by all to bear their persons, holding absolute and undivided power for their protection.

• The subject, author of the sovereign's acts

  A person who has covenanted to obey in exchange for protection and keeps an inalienable right to self-defence.

• The Foole, objector in Chapter XV

  Hobbes's imagined interlocutor who says in his heart there is no such thing as justice and that breaking covenants can be rational.

• The man in Bedlam, illustration in Chapter VIII

  An asylum inmate who converses soberly but reveals his madness by claiming to be God the Father.

Lessons

• Fear as the founding political emotion

  Hobbes builds the state from the fear of violent death rather than from virtue or divine appointment. The argument forces readers to ask what security is worth and what liberties people will trade for it.

  • Is Hobbes's state of nature a historical claim, a thought experiment, or a description of civil war?
  • Which modern situations make Hobbes's argument feel most persuasive?
  • Why does Hobbes keep the right to resist being killed even against the sovereign?

• Madness as passion in excess

  Chapter VIII classifies madness by passions, pride producing rage and dejection producing melancholy, and notes that drunkenness reveals the same disorder. Hobbes's naturalism removes madness from demonic possession and places it on a continuum with ordinary emotion.

  • How does Hobbes link individual madness with the 'roaring' of a seditious multitude?
  • What does the Abdera fever story suggest about the social spread of mental disorder?

• Words govern before swords do

  Leviathan insists that misused language, absurd definitions and seditious books destroy states. Control of doctrine, education and interpretation is therefore one of the sovereign's essential powers, a claim that sharpens debates about censorship.

  • Why does Hobbes compare republican classics to the bite of a mad dog?
  • Is a sovereign that controls teaching compatible with free inquiry?

• The body politic and its diseases

  Hobbes's analogies between the commonwealth and a human body extend to pathology: epilepsy, ague, pleurisy, worms and bulimia. The metaphor shows how seventeenth-century medicine shaped political thinking about order and disorder.

  • What does each disease analogy in Chapter XXIX imply about the cure?
  • Where do political writers still use medical metaphors, and what do they hide?

Context

Hobbes wrote during the English Civil Wars (1642–1651), which pitted king against Parliament amid religious conflict between Anglicans, Presbyterians, Independents and sects, and ended with Charles I's execution in January 1649. He belonged to the circle of mechanical philosophers around Mersenne in Paris, influenced by Galileo and by Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood (1628), which Hobbes praised as the only new science whose author lived to see it accepted.

Composition

Hobbes developed his political theory in The Elements of Law (circulated 1640) and De Cive (1642, enlarged 1647). Leviathan was written in Paris between about 1649 and 1651 and published in London by Andrew Crooke in 1651; its anti-clericalism alienated the exiled royalist court. A Latin version, revised and with an appendix on heresy, appeared in Amsterdam in 1668. Several 1651 printings exist, distinguished by the ornament on the title page.

Reception

Leviathan was attacked by clergy, royalists and parliamentarians alike; after the Great Plague and Fire of 1665–1666 a Commons committee considered it as possible blasphemy, and Oxford University burned it in 1683. Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau and Kant all wrote in response to its premises. Modern readers range from rational-choice theorists who treat the state of nature as a prisoner's dilemma to Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss and Michael Oakeshott; the phrase 'nasty, brutish, and short' is among the most quoted in political philosophy.

Comparisons

• second-treatise-of-government

  Locke's state of nature is governed by natural law and property, and his government can be dissolved for breach of trust; it is the most direct liberal rebuttal of Hobbes's absolutism.

• the-social-contract

  Rousseau accepts that sovereignty is indivisible but locates it in the people's general will and accuses Hobbes of attributing to natural man passions that society itself produced.

• the-history-of-the-peloponnesian-war

  Hobbes's first published book was a translation of Thucydides, and the account of civil strife at Corcyra anticipates Leviathan's war of all against all.

• the-prince

  Machiavelli advises a ruler how to acquire and keep power; Hobbes argues why subjects should authorize that power in the first place and what limits remain.

• ethics

  Spinoza took over Hobbes's endeavour and self-preservation, but his free man is guided by reason toward joy, and his politics favour freedom of thought that Hobbes would allow the sovereign to restrict.

• the-anatomy-of-melancholy

  Burton's encyclopedic humoral account of melancholy and Hobbes's terse definition of it as dejection causing causeless fears belong to the same generation but represent the old and the new natural philosophy.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The frontispiece and the Introduction: a giant sovereign whose body is made of tiny subjects, and the comparison of the commonwealth to an automaton with a spring for a heart. Keep the image in mind; the whole book unfolds it.
• How Part I builds from the bottom up, starting with sense as motion and imagination as decaying sense, before reaching the passions, the restless desire of power in Chapter XI, and religion in Chapter XII. Hobbes wants politics to rest on a theory of the human machine.
• The state of nature in Chapter XIII, and the three causes of quarrel Hobbes names: competition, diffidence, and glory. Notice that the argument depends on rough equality, not on people being especially wicked.
• The Foole in Chapter XV, who says there is no such thing as justice, and how Hobbes answers him without appealing to heaven or hell.
• Parts III and IV, which most readers skip. Watch how Hobbes reads scripture to make the civil sovereign head of the church, and what he calls the kingdom of darkness.

Key terms and names

Leviathan

The sea monster of Job 41, which Hobbes uses as a name for the commonwealth, a mortal god made by human art. The title signals both its awesome power and that nothing on earth can be compared to it.

State of nature

The condition of human beings with no common power over them, described in Chapter XIII. Because each can kill the other, it becomes a war of every man against every man in which no industry, arts, or letters can flourish.

Laws of nature

Theorems of reason about self-preservation, set out in Chapters XIV and XV. The first is to seek peace; the second is to lay down one's right to all things if others will do the same.

Covenant

The mutual agreement by which each person authorizes a sovereign to act for him. Hobbes insists that covenants without the sword are but words, so the agreement must create a power able to enforce it.

Author and actor

Hobbes's distinction in Chapter XVI between the one who owns an action and the one who performs it. Subjects are the authors of the sovereign's acts, which is why Hobbes says a sovereign cannot injure them.

The Foole

The imagined objector of Chapter XV who says in his heart there is no justice and that breaking covenants can be rational. Hobbes argues that one who breaks faith cannot be received into any society that protects him.

Diseases of a commonwealth

Chapter XXIX's comparison of causes of political collapse to bodily illness: divided sovereignty to epilepsy, the reading of Greek and Roman republican authors to the bite of a mad dog, monopolies to pleurisy.

Kingdom of darkness

Part IV's name for the confederacy of deceivers who, Hobbes argues, misread scripture, import pagan demonology and vain philosophy, and so usurp civil power. His chief targets are the papacy and scholastic Aristotelianism.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension In the Introduction, what parts of the human body does Hobbes match to parts of the commonwealth, and what does he say plays the role of the soul?
2. Comprehension According to Chapter XIII, what three causes of quarrel arise from human nature, and what is missing from life in the state of nature?
3. Comprehension What liberties does a subject keep even under an absolute sovereign, according to Chapter XXI?
4. Interpretation Hobbes begins Leviathan with sense, imagination, and the passions rather than with God or the common good. How does the mechanical psychology of Part I make the conclusions of Part II seem necessary?
5. Interpretation In Chapter XI Hobbes describes a perpetual and restless desire of power after power that ends only in death. Is this a description of human nature as such, or of human nature during a civil war like the one Hobbes lived through?
6. Interpretation How does Hobbes answer the Foole in Chapter XV? Is his answer about justice, or only about self-interest correctly understood?
7. Interpretation Why does Hobbes compare the reading of Greek and Roman republican authors to the bite of a mad dog in Chapter XXIX? What does he fear those books do to subjects?
8. Big Question Hobbes argues that people should accept almost any government rather than risk returning to civil war. Is peace the highest political good, or are there things worth the risk of disorder?

Faith Connections

• Job 41 (Scripture)

  Hobbes takes his title from the Leviathan of Job 41, the creature no one on earth can match, which God displays to humble Job. In Job the beast shows God's power over all proud things; Hobbes turns the image into a mortal god made by human art, and readers should weigh what changes when the monster is ours.

• Romans 13:1-7 (Scripture)

  Paul teaches that the governing authorities are ordained of God and bear the sword as ministers of God for good. Hobbes reaches a similar duty of obedience, but by a covenant of frightened individuals rather than by divine ordinance, and comparing the two grounds sharpens what obedience means.

• Augustine, City of God XIX (Church Fathers)

  Augustine says the earthly city seeks an earthly peace and that Christians use that peace while their hope lies elsewhere. Hobbes makes earthly peace the whole purpose of the commonwealth, and Augustine's account of peace as the tranquillity of order offers a fuller standard to measure it by.

• Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 94 (Great Conversation)

  For Aquinas, natural law is the rational creature's participation in eternal law, directing human beings to goods such as life, family, knowledge of God, and life in society. Hobbes keeps the phrase laws of nature but reduces them to theorems of self-preservation, which shows exactly where his break with the older tradition lies.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Human beings are roughly equal in their power to kill one another, and each is driven by appetite and fear of violent death. Without a common power, competition, diffidence, and glory produce a war of all against all in which life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Reason therefore directs each person to seek peace and to lay down his right to all things if others will do the same. But covenants without the sword are but words. Therefore people must authorize a single sovereign, whose power is undivided and unpunishable, to bear their persons and keep them in awe; any division or limitation of that power returns them toward civil war.

Rhetorical device: asyndeton and climax. In Chapter XIII Hobbes ends his list of what the state of nature lacks with a run of adjectives without conjunctions, ending on the life of man as solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short. The flat piling of words, each worse than the last and ending on the shortest, makes the argument felt before it is analysed.

Debate: Resolved: Hobbes is right that a people without a sovereign power would fall into a war of every man against every man.

Memory Work

and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short

So that in the first place, I put for a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death

Writing Prompts

Essay: Hobbes calls the commonwealth an artificial man and a mortal god. Using the Introduction, Chapter XIII, and Chapter XVII, argue whether Hobbes's sovereign is best understood as a machine, a person, or a god, and what follows for the subject who lives under it.

Comparison with Second Treatise of Government: Hobbes and Locke both begin with a state of nature and a social contract, yet Hobbes concludes for an undivided sovereign and Locke for a government that can be dissolved for breach of trust. Compare their accounts of the state of nature and argue which premise explains the difference in their conclusions.

Medical Lens

Leviathan matters to the history of psychiatry as an early fully materialist account of mind: sensation, imagination, dreaming and passion are all motions in the body, and madness is passion in excess, arising either from bodily disorder or producing it. Chapter VIII's taxonomy (rage from pride, melancholy from dejection), its Bedlam example, and its comparison of madness with drunkenness reject demonic explanations in favour of natural ones, while recounting ancient cases of collective disorder (the Abdera fever and the epidemic of suicides among Milesian maidens) that read today as social contagion. Hobbes's account of dreams and apparitions in Chapter II explains ghosts as misread dream images. The medical analogies of Chapter XXIX (epilepsy, hydrophobia, ague, pleurisy, worms, bulimia) document seventeenth-century pathology, including Harvey's circulation. Modern readers sometimes describe the state of nature as a portrait of chronic threat and hypervigilance; this is an interpretive parallel, not Hobbes's framing.

• Introduction

  The body as clockwork (heart as spring, nerves as strings, joints as wheels) and the state as an artificial man.

  Anatomy DissectionMind Body
• Part I, Ch. II, 'Of Imagination'

  Imagination as decaying sense; dreams caused by internal bodily motions; apparitions and belief in ghosts explained as misread dreams.

  Dreams NightmaresPsychology UnconsciousDementia Memory
• Part I, Ch. VI, 'Of the Interiour Beginnings of Voluntary Motions'

  Definitions of the passions as forms of appetite and aversion, including fear, grief, anxiety and the 'Panique Terror' of crowds.

  Neurosis AnxietyGriefMind Body
• Part I, Ch. VIII

  Madness as excessive passion; rage and melancholy; the man in Bedlam who claims to be God the Father; drunkenness; the Abdera fever epidemic and the hanging maidens of a Greek city.

  Madness PsychosisMelancholia DepressionAlcoholAsylum InstitutionSuicideFever Infection
• Part I, Ch. XIII

  Life in the natural condition dominated by continual fear and danger of violent death.

  Neurosis AnxietyDeath Dying
• Part II, Ch. XXIV, 'Of the Nutrition, and Procreation of a Common-wealth'

  Money compared to blood circulating through the veins and arteries of the commonwealth, an explicit use of Harvey's discovery.

  Anatomy DissectionVampirism Blood
• Part II, Ch. XXIX

  Diseases of the commonwealth compared to epilepsy, hydrophobia, ague, pleurisy, intestinal worms (ascarides) and bulimia.

  Epilepsy SeizuresFever InfectionPhysicians DoctorsStarvation Nutrition
• Part II, Ch. XXX

  The sovereign's duty to provide for those unable to work through public charity rather than private uncertain alms.

  Public Health SanitationDisability Deformity
• Part IV, Ch. XLV, 'Of Daemonology'

  Critique of belief in demons and possession, reinterpreting biblical demoniacs as madmen and lunatics.

  Madness PsychosisEpilepsy Seizures

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Write the conversation in Bedlam that Hobbes imagines in Chapter VIII, then continue it with a modern psychiatrist taking over the interview.

• Essay

  Evaluate Hobbes's Chapter XXIX disease analogies. Which ones illuminate politics, and which lead to dangerous conclusions about 'curing' dissent?

• Fiction

  Tell the story of the Abdera fever epidemic, when theatre-goers fell ill and recited Euripides' Andromeda until winter cured them, from the point of view of a town physician.

• Classroom

  Have students map the frontispiece of Leviathan: identify each emblem of temporal and spiritual power and connect it to a chapter of the text.

Further Reading

• De Cive, Thomas Hobbes

• Hobbes: A Biography, A. P. Martinich

• Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, Quentin Skinner

• Leviathan and the Air-Pump, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer

  Hobbes's dispute with Robert Boyle over experimental science.

• Brief Lives, John Aubrey

  Contains Aubrey's portrait of his friend Hobbes.