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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Part I, Ch. XIII

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

• 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.

• Part II, Ch. XXIX

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

• Part II, Ch. XXX

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

• Part IV, Ch. XLV, 'Of Daemonology'

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