LEVIATHAN

Author: Thomas Hobbes
Year: 1968 (1651)
Publisher: Penguin Books
Language: English

In 1577, Etienne de la Boetie’s work “Discours de la servitude volontaire” (see review on this blog from July 2021) framed the question why people, villages, cities, and entire nations allow themselves to be subjugated and oppressed by a single ruler who without their consent would have no means of exercising control over them. His was a simple but wildly controversial question and the book gives one of the oldest comprehensive arguments in favour of civil disobedience in European philosophy.

I have found no evidence that Thomas Hobbes ever read de la Boetie. Indeed, as tantalising as the thought is, efforts by scholars much more accomplished than I to connect Hobbes with de la Boetie have also amounted to nothing (see e.g. Reiss, Timothy J., “Utopia Versus State of Power, or Pretext of the Political Discourse of Modernity:Hobbes, Reader of La Boétie?” in French Connections in the English Renaissance by Catherine Gimelli Martin & Hassan Melehy (eds), London, 2013). And yet, Hobbes’s most famous book “Leviathan” seems to address perfectly the concerns of his French precursor. If de la Boetie asks “why?”, then Hobbes answers “this is why!” and moreover explains why it cannot be in any other way.

“Leviathan” is written in four parts, the first two of which are the ones most commonly cited in modern public discourse.

1.      Of Man

2.      Of Common-Wealth

3.      Of A Christian Common-Wealth

4.      Of the Kingdome of Darknesse

In its most basic albeit no doubt most useful and essential interpretation, “Leviathan” is understood to demonstrate how mankind, being the egotistic, violent, and greedy creature that we are (Hobbes’s opinion of humans seems to be akin to Jonathan Swift’s of yahoos (see review on this blog of “Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World, By Lemuel Gulliver” from March 2022), would be unable to function as a peaceful collective had there been no overarching power to pacify us. Hobbes calls this primordial unfettered anarchy the State of Nature and in the most famous part of the book concludes that in such a state, human life would be “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Hobbes’s argument is that if there were no laws, and more importantly still, no one to enforce them, there would be nothing stopping individuals from murdering one another and stealing from each other. The state of nature is by definition a state of war. Hobbes specifies that war does not necessarily mean a constant ongoing use of force. For a state of war to exist, it is enough that the threat of force, or the suspicion that someone may use force, prevails. Consequently, it would make sense for rational beings to come together and agree on a set of rules that would limit the liberties of each of them to harm others in exchange for a corresponding limitation of the risk of being harmed by others. We know this line of thought today as the “social contract”, but Hobbes did not use that term. Instead, he uses the terms “covenant” and “common-wealth” to cover different aspects of what we understand as the social contract.

Without a central authority that has the power to enforce the contract the agreement as such has no purpose as it can always be broken with impunity for, as Hobbes writes, “the Passions of man are commonly more potent than their Reason”. This is why Hobbes introduces the sovereign; the Leviathan, with unlimited power to make sure that people live in peace within the framework of the covenant.

The sovereign is not a party to the contract but rather a result of it. The contract is not between the people and the sovereign but between people and people. The sovereign as an entity is the ensuing result of this agreement as a third party. Consequently, the sovereign is not bound or constrained by the contract. The power of the sovereign is unlimited and unchecked and must remain so. I understand Hobbes’s argument to be that since the amount of violence that can be wrought upon others by all of us is constant and unlimited, when the authority to exercise violence is transferred from us to the sovereign it follows that it must remain unlimited. Furthermore, analogous to the inability of people to regulate themselves, which requires the creation of the sovereign in the first place, the sovereign also cannot be expected to regulate himself which is why there can be no basis for a limit to his power or accountability for his actions. For peace to be guaranteed, and for the social contract to remain intact, the sovereign may not in any way be challenged or disobeyed.

Hobbes certainly acknowledged that such a state of affairs would by necessity bring about a series of negative consequences for individuals and collectives alike but argued that any inconvenience would be preferable to the alternative which is the state of war. The only condition under which subjects are absolved from obedience is if their sovereign fails to uphold peace and security between them as per the covenant.

Lesser known is Hobbes’s analysis of Christianity with regard to the civil law and the division of power between God and the sovereign. Hobbes, who may or may not have been an atheist, goes to great pains to disconnect the power of God from our lives on Earth. He argues that obedience to God’s law is not obedience to God but to the sovereign who enforces it. In Hobbes’s view, God Himself is incapable of enforcing his own laws on Earth and needs to rely on kings and princes to do it for Him. In that dwells the difference between crime and sin. Both disrespect the legislator all the while the former is being enforced and the latter is not. Sometimes, but not always, they coincide.

In essence, Hobbes takes issue with the expectation that people are asked to obey a divine law professed by someone who claims to have received it through a revelation without being presented with any reason to believe that such a revelation has actually taken place. He refers to the Scripture (1 Kings 13) where a prophet sent by God to Jeroboam is deceived by a false prophet. If even a man of God can be fooled by a simple con artist, how are common people supposed to be able to tell true prophets apart from false ones? Therefore, it is rational for all humans not to rely on scuttlebutt about divine law, but instead to subordinate themselves under the fixed and unambiguous laws of the sovereign.

Hobbes’s second argument is that we are actually not living in the Kingdom of God in this era. He rejects the idea that the Kingdom of God is an ethereal existence but rather stresses that it refers to this world, though not this time. He identifies the Kingdom of God as beginning with the covenant between God and Moses and ending when the Israelites demand a king like other nations have, and the prophet Samuel anoints Saul to be their king. All of Samuel’s warnings about the consequences of having a king instead of being ruled by priests coalesce into Hobbes’s definition of the Leviathan but the words of the prophet fall on deaf ears and the people insist on a sovereign. God then speaks to Samuel “it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king” and Hobbes sees here the end of the Kingdom of God on Earth, with God’s approval. The obligation to obey divine law has thus been transformed to the obligation to obey civil law.

Hobbes finds a decisive piece of evidence in the fifth book of the New Testament wherein Christ sends his disciples to all corners of the world to teach, persuade, counsel, and baptise. Not to rule. Therefore, there is no conflict between being a Christian and obeying a heathen prince. Nor is it a sin to disavow Christ if commanded to do so under the threat of punishment. It is simply an act of obedience to once earthly sovereign. Lip service, as it were. “The (Unum Necessarium) Onely Article of Faith which the Scripture maketh simply Necessary to Salvation, is this, that JESUS IS THE CHRIST.” All that is required of a Christian is that they believe.     

This is a decisive break from the traditional understanding of the king’s right to rule wherein the king used to be portrayed as being appointed by God to uphold his law. Hobbes throws that notion out and argues that the sovereign is appointed by the people and receives his authority from the people and not at all from God.

In the final section of “Leviathan”, Hobbes attacks the Church of his day and particularly its reliance on the teachings of Aristotle whom he calls absurd, repugnant, and ignorant. Aristotle’s teachings that the human being is a social and political creature naturally predisposed to thriving in a peaceful and well-organised community and does not fully bloom until they accept their role as a political participant in a large-scale society is the direct anti-thesis to Hobbes’s grim judgment of man as a savage beast.  

He goes on to call out four main sources of darkness in the church: ignorance of the Scripture, fascination with ghosts and demons, mixing in false philosophy (Aristotle), and confusing faith with tradition. The Roman Catholic Church in particular takes the brunt of Hobbes’s critique but the Anglican Church is not spared with all its rituals and ceremonies with regard to communion and baptism which the philosopher dismisses as “Incantation, rather than Consecration”.

The many important observations and well-founded conclusions notwithstanding, Hobbes, in my view, missed a crucial parameter in his analysis. It is commonly accepted that the docile and peace-loving philosopher was spurred to his work on government by the horrors of the English civil war which made him focus on peace within a common-wealth. This may also explain why he made no efforts to propose a solution to violence between common-wealths. Modern history has shown that the likelihood of two democratic countries going to war against each other is infinitely smaller than if any other type of government is involved. I imagine that this perspective might have inspired Hobbes to somewhat adjust his stalwart support for the absolute monarchy.

Needless to say, Hobbes’s work was hugely controversial in his days and decades to come. Hobbes was declared persona non grata in Paris for having attacked the Pope, the book was banned in England and even burned in public displays of outrage, and his follow-up, “Behemoth”, was graciously withheld from publication by King Charles II with the benevolent intention of preserving whatever was left of Hobbes’s good name until the philosopher had passed away. Among his contemporaries, John Locke, albeit critical of several of the propositions made by him, was one of few thinkers who recognised Hobbes’s work as an intellectual masterpiece that opened the door to a new way of thinking about government and power.

As time went by and the uproar subsided, “Leviathan” cemented its position as one of the most ground-breaking philosophical pieces of literature in history of Western thought, and went on to inspire such thinkers as Jean-Jacque Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, and indirectly Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and Louis Althusser.