Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, commonly referred to as Leviathan, is a work of social and political theory by the English empiricist philosopher and political theorist Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), published in 1651 (revised Latin edition 1668).Hilary Brown, Luise Gottsched the Translator, Camden House, 2012, p. 54. Its name derives from the chaotic Leviathan sea serpent of the Hebrew Bible and earlier mythologies.
The work concerns the structure of society and legitimate government, and is regarded as one of the earliest and most influential examples of social contract theory.
Written during the English Civil War (1642–1651), it argues for a social contract and rule by an absolute sovereign. Hobbes asserts that civil war and the "nasty, brutish and short" state of nature ("the war of all against all") could be avoided only by a strong, undivided government.
Content Title The title of Hobbes's treatise alludes to the Leviathan mentioned in the Book of Job. In contrast to the simply informative titles usually given to works of early modern political philosophy, such as John Locke's Two Treatises of Government or Hobbes's own earlier work, The Elements of Law, Hobbes selected a poetic name for this more provocative treatise.
Lexicographers in the early modern period supposed that the term "leviathan" was associated with the Hebrew words , meaning "to couple, connect or join", though in other cases meaning "to borrow", and , believed to mean "a serpent or dragon". In the Westminster Assembly's annotations on the Bible, the interpreters thought that the creature was named using these root words "because by his bignesse he seemes not one single creature, but a coupling of divers together; or because his scales are closed, or straitly compacted together." Samuel Mintz suggests that these connotations lend themselves to Hobbes's understanding of political force since both "Leviathan and Hobbes's sovereign are unities compacted out of separate individuals; they are omnipotent; they cannot be destroyed or divided; they inspire fear in men; they do not make pacts with men; theirs is the dominion of power" on pain of death.Mintz, p. 5.
Frontispiece After lengthy discussion with Thomas Hobbes, the Parisian Abraham Bosse created the etching for the book's famous frontispiece in the style which Bosse himself had refined. It is similar in organisation to the frontispiece of Hobbes' De Cive (1642), created by Jean Matheus. The frontispiece has two main elements.
In it, a giant crowned figure is seen emerging from the landscape, clutching a sword and a crosier, beneath a quotation from the Book of Job—"" ("There is no power on earth to be compared to him. Job 41.24")—further linking the figure to the monster of the book. (Due to disagreements over the precise location of the chapters and verses when they were divided in the Late Middle Ages, the verse Hobbes quotes is usually given as Job 41:33 in modern Christian translations into English, Job 41:25 in the Masoretic Text, Septuagint, and the Luther Bible; it is Job 41:24 in the Vulgate.) The torso and arms of the figure are composed of over three hundred persons, in the style of Giuseppe Arcimboldo; all are facing away from the viewer, with just the giant's head having visible facial features. (A manuscript of Leviathan created for Charles II in 1651 has notable differences – a different main head but significantly the body is also composed of many faces, all looking outwards from the body and with a range of expressions.)
The lower portion is a triptych, framed in a wooden border. The centre form contains the title on an ornate curtain. The two sides reflect the sword and crosier of the main figure – earthly power on the left and the powers of the church on the right. Each side element reflects the equivalent power – castle to church, crown to mitre, cannon to excommunication, weapons to logic, and the battlefield to the religious courts. The giant holds the symbols of both sides, reflecting the union of secular, and spiritual in the sovereign, but the construction of the torso also makes the figure the state.
Introduction Hobbes opens with a complex extended metaphor involving the automaton, the human body, and the state on the basis of mechanism and corpuscularianism (or corporeal materialism). He presents an image of the bodies of men and states in motion, arguing for a mechanical (scientific) explanation:Hobbes, Leviathan, Introduction.
After giving a brief content summary, he also warns:Hobbes, Leviathan, Introduction.
Part I: Of Man In giving an account of sense empiricism and human nature, Hobbes centers words and their definitions ("how necessary it is for any man that aspires to true Knowledge, to examine the Definitions of former Authors"). Initially, he looks for constants and universals. Even good and evil are just the conventional names for an individual's appetites and desires, or the tendency to move toward or away from an object. Hope is nothing more than an appetite for a thing combined with an opinion that it can be had. By contrast, he argues, scholasticism thrives on formulations like incorporeal substance, which (for Hobbes) are contradictions in terms.Hobbes, Leviathan, Part I.
He espouses a nominalism ("there being nothing in the world Universall but Names imposed on many things, for their similitude in some quality, or other accident"). Though "Nature cannot erre", he writes, "men abound in copiousnesse of language; so they become more wise, or more mad than ordinary". He admires geometric axioms and writes that "words are wise mens counters, they do but reckon by them". He warns, however, that "words are the mony [money] of fooles, that value them by the authority of an Aristotle or any other Doctor whatsoever, if but a man", because "there can be no certainty of the last Conclusion, without a certainty of all those Affirmations and Negations, on which it was grounded, and inferred", starting from definitions ("men begin at Definitions").Hobbes, Leviathan, Part I.
Hobbes describes human psychology without any reference to the , or greatest good, as previous thought had done. According to Hobbes, not only is the concept of a superfluous, but given the variability of human desires, there could be no such thing. Consequently, any political community that sought to provide the greatest good to its members would find itself driven by competing conceptions of that good with no way to decide among them. The result would be civil war.
However, Hobbes states that there is a , or greatest evil. This is the fear of violent death. A political community can be oriented around this fear.
Since there is no , the natural state of man is not to be found in a political community that pursues the greatest good. To be outside of a political community, however, is to be in an anarchic condition. Given human nature, the variability of human desires, and need for scarce resources to fulfill those desires, the "state of nature", as Hobbes calls this anarchic condition, must be a war of all against all. Even when two men are not fighting, neither has a guarantee that the other will not try to kill him for his property or just out of an aggrieved sense of honour, and so they must constantly be on guard against one another. It is even reasonable to preemptively attack one's neighbour.
The desire to avoid the state of nature, as the place where the of violent death is most likely to occur, forms the polestar of political reasoning. It suggests a number of laws of nature, although Hobbes is quick to point out that they cannot properly speaking be called "laws", since there is no one to enforce them. The first thing that reason suggests is to seek peace, but that where peace cannot be had, to use all of the advantages of war.Hobbes, Leviathan, XIV.4. Hobbes is explicit that in the state of nature nothing can be considered just or unjust, and every man must be considered to have a right to all things.Hobbes, Leviathan, XIII.13. The second law of nature is that one ought to be willing to renounce one's right to all things where others are willing to do the same, to quit the state of nature, and to erect a commonwealth with the authority to command them in all things. Hobbes concludes Part One by articulating an additional seventeen laws of nature that make the performance of the first two possible and by explaining what it would mean for a sovereign to represent the people even when they disagree with the sovereign.
Part II: Of Commonwealth The purpose of a commonwealth is given at the start of Part II:
The commonwealth is instituted when all agree in the following manner: "I authorise and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition; that thou give up, thy right to him, and authorise all his actions in like manner."
The sovereign has twelve principal rights:Hobbes, Leviathan, XVIII.
Because a successive covenant cannot override a prior one, the subjects cannot (lawfully) change the form of government. Because the covenant forming the commonwealth results from subjects giving to the sovereign the right to act for them, the sovereign cannot possibly breach the covenant; and therefore the subjects can never argue to be freed from the covenant because of the actions of the sovereign. The sovereign exists because the majority has consented to his rule; the minority have agreed to abide by this arrangement and must then assent to the sovereign's actions. Every subject is author of the acts of the sovereign: hence the sovereign cannot injure any of his subjects and cannot be accused of injustice. Following this, the sovereign cannot justly be put to death by the subjects. The purpose of the commonwealth is peace, and the sovereign has the right to do whatever he thinks necessary for the preserving of peace and security and prevention of discord. Therefore, the sovereign may judge what opinions and doctrines are averse, who shall be allowed to speak to multitudes, and who shall examine the doctrines of all books before they are published. To prescribe the rules of civil law and property. To be judge in all cases. To make war and peace as he sees fit and to command the army. To choose counsellors, ministers, magistrates and officers. To reward with riches and honour or to punish with corporal or pecuniary punishment or ignominy. To establish laws about honour and a scale of worth.
In item 6 Hobbes is explicitly in favour of censorship of the press and restrictions on the rights of free speech should they be considered desirable by the sovereign to promote order.
Types
There are three types of commonwealths: monarchy, aristocracy and democracy.
And only three, since, unlike Aristotle, he does not sub-divide them into "good" and "deviant":
And monarchy is the best, on practical grounds:
Succession The right of succession always lies with the sovereign. Democracies and aristocracies have easy succession; monarchy is harder:
Because in general people have not thought carefully. However, the succession is definitely in the gift of the monarch:
But, it is not always obvious who the monarch has appointed:
However, the answer is:
And this means:
Note that (perhaps rather radically) this does not have to be any blood relative:
However, practically this means:
Religion