Thomas Hobbes · Politics
Hobbes’s solution to the war of all against all: a covenant in which everyone surrenders their natural freedom to a common power, in exchange for peace.
Hobbes’s state of nature is unbearable - but he believed human beings are rational enough to escape it. The same self-interest that drives the war also, on reflection, points the way out: a person who fears violent death above all will reason that peace is worth a price. Reason discovers ‘laws of nature’ - rules for self-preservation - the first of which commands us to seek peace. But how? The answer is a mutual agreement: a covenant, or social contract.
Here Hobbes sees a deep difficulty. In the state of nature, why would anyone keep their side of a bargain? If I disarm first and you don’t, I’m dead. Covenants of mutual trust, where one must perform before the other, are worthless when either party can safely betray. So the contract cannot work on good faith alone. It requires a power great enough to terrify everyone into keeping their word - to make the cost of betrayal higher than the gain. Without enforcement, the promise is empty air.
Hobbes’s contract does something subtler than a mere promise to obey, and the subtlety is the key to his whole theory. The covenant is made by ‘every man with every man’ - among the subjects, with one another - and what each does is to authorise the sovereign: to make the sovereign their representative, owning its actions as their own, as if each subject had personally done whatever the sovereign does. Through this act of authorisation, a mere multitude of separate individuals is welded into a single person - the commonwealth - with one will, the sovereign’s will, standing for them all. The many literally become one.
Two consequences follow that are crucial to grasp. First, because the contract is among the subjects and not with the sovereign, the sovereign is not a party to it and promises nothing - so the sovereign cannot be accused of breaking a contract it never made, and therefore cannot be justly resisted or removed on those grounds. This is Hobbes’s most ruthless move, and it is built into the very structure of the agreement. Second, because the subjects have authorised the sovereign’s acts as their own, to rebel against the sovereign is, on Hobbes’s logic, to rebel against yourself - to disown your own act and will. The sovereign’s deeds are your deeds; its punishments of you are punishments you have authorised. By making the people the authors of everything the sovereign does, Hobbes manufactures a power that is total, irreversible, and - by the very terms of its creation - beyond legitimate complaint. The genius of the design and its danger are inseparable.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Hobbes’s contract is a mutual surrender of rights. Explain why each person agrees to it, and what problem the ‘sword’ solves, in your own words.
Leads to John Locke.
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