Thomas Hobbes · Politics
At the root of Hobbes’s whole system lies one inalienable right - to defend your own life - which even the absolute sovereign cannot take away.
Before any government exists, Hobbes says, each person has one fundamental right - the right of nature. It is not a right to property or to rule, but something more primal: the liberty to use your own power, however you judge fit, to preserve your own life. In the state of nature this right is unlimited, extending even to another’s body, because where there is no security, anything might be necessary for survival. Everything in Hobbes’s politics grows from this single root: the right to stay alive.
This gives Hobbes a striking exception to his otherwise total absolutism. If the sovereign condemns you to death - even justly - you are not obliged to go meekly; you may resist, flee, or fight for your life. If commanded to kill yourself, to confess a capital crime, or to fight in war, you retain a liberty to refuse, because no one can be bound to act against their own preservation. The sovereign may have the power to kill you, but you never had the duty to let it. Obligation ends exactly where mortal danger begins.
Even under an absolute sovereign, Hobbes insists, subjects retain real liberties - and seeing where they lie reveals the surprising amount of freedom hidden inside his authoritarian system. Beyond the inalienable right of self-preservation, subjects are free in everything the sovereign has not regulated: in ‘the silence of the law.’ The sovereign cannot, in practice, make laws about everything, and wherever the law is silent, the subject may act as they judge best. Hobbes lists the liberty ‘to buy, and sell, and otherwise contract with one another; to choose their own abode, their own diet, their own trade of life, and institute their children as they themselves think fit, and the like.’ This is a genuine, if precarious, sphere of personal freedom - and notably, much of it is the freedom of economic and private life, the buying, selling, and choosing that a commercial society runs on.
Two things are striking here. First, Hobbes’s ‘liberty’ is the bare absence of legal restraint - you are free to do whatever the law does not forbid - rather than any positive right the sovereign must respect; the sovereign could legislate into these areas, and the subject would then have to obey. This is a thinner kind of freedom than the liberal tradition would later demand (protected rights the state may not invade). But second, the space is real, and Hobbes clearly expects it to be large: his sovereign is meant to secure the peace and otherwise largely leave people alone to pursue ‘commodious living.’ There is, buried in the absolutist Leviathan, a quietly liberal expectation - that a wise sovereign will regulate only what peace requires and leave a broad domain of private and economic liberty untouched. Hobbes grants no right to that liberty against the sovereign, but he assumes a sovereign with the sense to allow it, since a free and thriving people is exactly what makes a commonwealth strong.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that the right of self-preservation is the one right no contract can transfer. Explain why Hobbes thinks it cannot be given up, in your own words.
Leads to Thomas Jefferson.
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