Thomas Hobbes · Politics
Why Hobbes insisted the sovereign’s power must be absolute and undivided - a Leviathan strong enough that no one dares break the peace.
Hobbes named his great work after a biblical sea-monster: Leviathan, the most powerful of creatures. The state, he argued, is an artificial Leviathan - a giant body whose limbs are its citizens, animated by the sovereign as its soul. On the book’s famous frontispiece, a towering crowned figure looms over the land, and his body is composed of hundreds of tiny people, all looking toward his face. The image is the argument: the many become one mighty person, and that person is the commonwealth.
Hobbes draws the consequences without flinching. The sovereign makes the laws and is not bound by them; judges all disputes; commands the army; decides war and peace; appoints ministers; and even determines which doctrines may be taught and preached, since opinions stir rebellion. The subjects, having authorised all this, cannot justly resist, depose, or punish the sovereign, nor accuse it of injury - for to do so is to attack their own act. There is no appeal beyond the sovereign, because an appeal would require a higher power, and a higher power would just be the real sovereign instead.
Hobbes’s sovereign is not simply the biggest bully with the most soldiers; the concept is subtler, and the subtlety is one of his most lasting contributions to political theory: the idea of representation. The sovereign is the ‘representative person’ of the commonwealth - the one whose will counts as the will of them all, who acts in the name of every subject, and whose acts the subjects own as their own. A crowd of individuals is just a multitude, a heap of separate wills; it becomes a single people, capable of acting as one, only by being represented by a single person (one man or one assembly) whose decisions stand for the whole. The unity of the commonwealth lies not in the crowd but in the representative who gives it one voice.
This idea has consequences in both directions. It is what lets Hobbes say the sovereign’s power comes from the people (they authorised the representation) while also being over them (the representative’s will now counts as theirs). And it introduced into political thought a concept that would become absolutely central to modern democracy, though Hobbes used it to justify absolutism: that a government can represent a people - speak and act for them as a single body - without being identical to them or directly controlled by them. Later democratic theory would keep Hobbes’s insight that a people acts through its representatives, while insisting (against Hobbes) that the representation be accountable, periodic, and revocable. The notion that legitimate authority is representative authority - that the state acts in the name of the governed - begins here, in the very work that used it to build a mortal god.
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 rejected dividing or limiting sovereign power. Reconstruct his argument that a divided sovereign is no sovereign at all, in your own words.
Leads to Montesquieu.
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