Thomas Hobbes · Politics
Hobbes’s thought experiment: strip away government entirely, and human life becomes a terror of every man against every man.
Writing during the English Civil War, with the country tearing itself apart, Thomas Hobbes asked a stark question: what would human life be like with no government at all - no laws, no police, no courts, no shared authority to keep order? He called this imagined condition the state of nature. His answer, in Leviathan (1651), was the bleakest in political philosophy, and he meant it as a warning about what we are spared.
Hobbes locates three roots of conflict in human nature itself. Competition makes men fight for gain - to seize others’ goods, lands, lives. Diffidence, meaning distrust and fear, makes them fight for safety - striking first against those who might strike them. And glory makes them fight for reputation, over a word, a smile, a slight. In a world with no authority to deter any of this, the result is not occasional violence but a permanent condition of war - not always fighting, but always the readiness and threat of it.
One of Hobbes’s most shocking claims is that in the state of nature there is no justice and no injustice - not because people are wicked, but because the very concepts have no application there. Justice and injustice, he argues, are qualities of people living in society; they require a common standard, a law, and a power to enforce it. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where there is no law, there is no injustice. In the war of all against all, ‘the notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place.’ Each person has a right to everything, even to another’s body, because there is no agreed rule limiting anyone - and a right that everyone has to everything is, in practice, a right to nothing secure.
This has a startling corollary that Hobbes states without flinching: in the state of nature, force and fraud are the two cardinal virtues. The qualities that would make you a monster in society - violence and deceit - are exactly the qualities that keep you alive where there is no law. There is no property either, no ‘mine’ and ‘thine,’ only what each can take and hold. This is why Hobbes insists that morality, property, and justice are not natural facts written into the world but creations of the commonwealth - they come into being only when a common power establishes the laws and the security that make them possible. Strip away the state, and you strip away not just safety but the moral world itself. This is the deepest measure of how much, for Hobbes, we owe to the mere existence of an enforced order.
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 derives the need for government from the state of nature. Reconstruct why he thinks equality and scarcity lead to war, in your own words.
Leads to Jean Jacques Rousseau.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.