29 September 2026 · Ethics and the State

Hobbes and the Birth of the Commonwealth

Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan in 1651, in the middle of the English Civil War, after years of watching his own country tear itself apart over who should hold power. That background matters for everything that follows. Hobbes was not writing an abstract thought experiment for its own sake. He had just lived through the kind of collapse he describes, and the book reads like someone trying to explain, with real logical care, why that collapse happened and what would stop it happening again.

The commonwealth as an artificial man

Hobbes opens by comparing the state to a human body. The sovereign is an artificial soul that gives the whole thing life and motion, officials are its joints, reward and punishment are its nerves, the wealth of its members is its strength, counsellors are its memory, and the laws are its reason and will. Civil war, in this picture, is simply death. The comparison is not just decoration. Hobbes is setting up the whole book as an exercise in reading human nature first, so he can then understand the artificial creature, the commonwealth, that humans build out of it.

What people are actually like without government

Chapter thirteen makes the famous argument about human equality. Hobbes says people are close enough in strength and mind that no one can count on a permanent advantage over anyone else. Even the weakest person can kill the strongest, through secret plotting or by joining with others. That rough equality is not comforting news. It means everyone can reasonably hope to get what they want, and when two people want the same thing they cannot both have, they become enemies.

From that equality comes what Hobbes calls diffidence, a kind of mutual distrust. If a person cannot be sure others will not attack first, the safest move is to strike first, or at least to build up more power than is strictly needed just to be safe. Hobbes names three causes of conflict that follow from this: competition, where people fight over scarce things; diffidence, where people fight purely for safety; and glory, where people fight over reputation, pride, or a perceived insult.

Without a common power to keep everyone in check, Hobbes says, people are in a state of war, not necessarily constant fighting, but a known readiness to fight at any time, the way bad weather is not one storm but an ongoing tendency toward rain. In that condition there is no point farming, building, trading, or inventing anything, because nobody can be sure of keeping what they make. This is the context for his most quoted line, that life in such a state would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. He adds something easy to miss: in this state there is no justice or injustice at all, because right and wrong only make sense once there is a common power and law. Before that, everything belongs to whoever can take and hold it.

The laws of nature and the first move toward peace

Chapter fourteen turns from the problem to the way out. Hobbes separates a right of nature, the freedom everyone has to use their own power to preserve their own life, from a law of nature, a rule discovered by reason that forbids people from doing things destructive to their own survival. The fundamental law of nature, as he puts it, is to seek peace wherever there is hope of getting it, and to use the tools of war only when peace is not available.

From that fundamental law comes a second one, that a person should be willing to give up the unlimited right to everything, as far as others are willing to do the same, and accept being as free against others as others are against them. This is the hinge of the whole argument. Giving up some of one's own unlimited freedom only makes sense if everyone else gives up theirs too, and Hobbes spends real care on what counts as actually giving up a right rather than merely saying so. He also says a few rights can never be fully given away, most importantly the right to defend one's own body against force, since no one can be understood to have agreed to their own death or injury.

The chapter also works out the machinery of agreements: how a simple exchange differs from a covenant that includes a promise to perform something later, why a covenant made purely out of mutual trust in a lawless state is not reliable, and why that unreliability is exactly the gap a sovereign power needs to fill.

Justice, and why it depends on having a commonwealth

Chapter fifteen is where Hobbes defines justice simply as keeping one's covenants. Injustice is just the failure to keep a covenant one has made, and he is careful to say that without a prior covenant, nothing can be unjust at all. He takes on an imagined skeptic, whom he calls the Fool, who argues in his heart that breaking a covenant can be perfectly reasonable whenever it serves one's own advantage. Hobbes rejects this at length, arguing that a person known to break agreements will not be trusted into any group that protects its members, and will therefore be worse off in the long run, not better.

He lists several more laws of nature in quick succession: gratitude for favors freely given, a general sociability he calls compleasance, pardon for those who show they will not repeat an offense, limiting revenge to what deters future harm rather than dwelling on the past, equal treatment when dividing shared goods, and a rule against favoritism when judging a dispute between others. He eventually compresses the whole list into a version of the golden rule, do not do to another what you would not want done to yourself, and closes with an important qualification: these laws of nature bind the conscience always, but they only have to be put into actual practice once there is enough security to do so safely. Trying to keep them alone in a lawless world, he warns, just gets a person taken advantage of.

Authorization, and how one person can stand for everyone

Chapter sixteen introduces the idea of a person in the legal rather than everyday sense, someone whose words or actions are treated as representing either themselves or someone else. Hobbes separates the actor, who performs an action, from the author, who owns that action and bears responsibility for it, because the actor had authority to act on the author's behalf. This sounds technical, but it does essential work for the argument that follows. It explains how an entire multitude of separate people, each with their own will, can be treated in law as a single person, once every individual authorizes one representative to act and speak for all of them together.

The social contract and the sovereign's near absolute power

Chapter seventeen contains the core move of the whole book. Hobbes argues that neither the laws of nature by themselves, nor small family groups, nor even a large but divided crowd, can secure real peace, because without one unified judgment to direct them, people still end up fighting each other over how to interpret and apply those very laws. The only way out, he concludes, is for a multitude of people to covenant with one another, each person to every other person, to hand over the right to govern themselves to one man or one assembly, on condition that everyone else does the same. The result is not a loose alliance but, in Hobbes's words, a real unity of all of them in one and the same person, which he calls a commonwealth, or that great Leviathan, which he even calls a mortal god, since it is this authority that keeps the peace among us under the one he regards as the immortal God.

Chapter eighteen then spells out what follows once a commonwealth is set up this way. Because every subject authorized the sovereign's actions in advance, the sovereign cannot, in Hobbes's logic, commit an injustice against a subject, and subjects cannot legitimately change the form of government afterward or complain that the arrangement is unfair, since they agreed to it themselves. Hobbes argues sovereign power should be as close to absolute as can be imagined, reasoning that any real world downside of concentrated power is still smaller than the certain disaster of civil war that comes from weak or divided authority.

What liberty actually means for a subject

Chapter twenty one, the final chapter covered here, defines liberty simply as the absence of outside obstacles to motion, nothing more than that, and argues this definition fits with people still being bound by the laws they live under, since a law only closes off the options it specifically forbids. Within a commonwealth, a subject's real liberty lies in whatever the sovereign has not bothered to regulate, trading, choosing where to live, raising one's children as one sees fit, and so on, because the law is silent on these things, not because the sovereign has promised never to touch them.

Hobbes is also careful to mark a few limits that cannot be contracted away, because they go back to that original right of self preservation. No one can be bound by covenant to kill or seriously harm themselves, to refuse the basic means of staying alive, or to confess to a crime without some promise of pardon, since all of that would defeat the very purpose that made the covenant worth making in the first place. He also works through edge cases: a soldier can sometimes refuse a direct order without acting unjustly if doing so does not abandon the common defense, a group that already resisted unjustly may still band together afterward purely to defend their own lives, and a subject's obligation to obey ends entirely once the sovereign can no longer protect them, since protection and obedience are, for Hobbes, two sides of the same bargain.

Why this still matters

What tends to surprise people meeting this text for the first time is how logically careful it is. Hobbes is not simply declaring that strong rulers are good. He is trying to build the argument step by step from a picture of human nature that he thinks any honest person will recognize in themselves, through a chain of definitions, laws, and covenants, to a conclusion many readers find genuinely uncomfortable: that almost unlimited sovereign power is actually the rational price of lasting peace. Whether or not one accepts that conclusion, later political thinkers, including Locke a few decades afterward, spent much of their own work responding directly to the picture Hobbes laid out here.

Source: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), the Introduction, Chapter 13 (Of the Natural Condition of Mankind as Concerning Their Felicity and Misery), Chapter 14 (Of the First and Second Natural Laws, and of Contracts), Chapter 15 (Of Other Laws of Nature), Chapter 16 (Of Persons, Authors, and Things Personated), Chapter 17 (Of the Causes, Generation, and Definition of a Commonwealth), Chapter 18 (Of the Rights of Sovereigns by Institution), and Chapter 21 (Of the Liberty of Subjects).