We read (parts of) Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) in April and early May 2025. It is one of the founding texts of modern political philosophy, and reading it is about as enjoyable as drinking five cement milkshakes in a row.
Hobbes's arguments have all the subtlety of a boiling pot of water thrown in your face. And they're written in 17th-century English prose that seems to simultaneously look down its nose at you, treats you like you have the intelligence of a toddler, and is trapped in an age when people were much more close-minded and ignorant. The organization is not much better - massive 4-part books, with 47 chapters, and headers that are long run-on sentences - so the whole thing is a frustrating exercise. One might even use the phrase "interminable biblical exegesis," if one were reaching for ten dollar words.
Full notes on the wiki: Leviathan.
The Argument in One Paragraph
Hobbes says: if there were no government, life would be a war of everyone against everyone else, and would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." To escape this, rational individuals agree (hypothetically, via a "social contract") to give up nearly all their natural rights and submit to an absolute sovereign - a person or an assembly - whose job is to keep the peace by force.
Equally important is Hobbes' proposition that any sovereign, no matter how bad, is preferable to no sovereign at all, because anarchy is worse than tyranny.
That is the whole book. Everything else is Hobbes methodically building the argument up from first principles, then defending it against every objection he can think of - including all the biblical objections that mattered in 1651 England.
Why This Book Was Written When It Was
Hobbes was writing during and immediately after the English Civil War (1642-1651). Charles I had been executed. The country had spent almost a decade in a chaotic three-way war between royalists, parliamentarians, and various religious factions. Hobbes's family had fled to France. When he wrote Leviathan, "war of all against all" was not a thought experiment - it was recent memory.
This context matters because modern readers instinctively resist Hobbes's absolutism. Absolute sovereignty sounds like tyranny. But Hobbes had watched what happens when there is no sovereign, and he thought tyranny was clearly the lesser evil.
The book is aimed at people who lived through the same collapse he did. Reading it in a functioning democracy in 2025 is a very different experience than reading it in 1651.
The Four Parts
Leviathan has four parts, roughly:
Part I: Of Man (16 chapters). Hobbes builds up an account of human nature from mechanistic first principles - all thought comes from sensory experience, all action is motion, all motivation is appetite or aversion. He argues that humans are roughly equal in capability, driven by "a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death," and so in the absence of a common power, they will inevitably fight each other for competition, safety, and glory.
Personal opinion: this is dreadfully boring - it has all the action-packed excitement of (insert the most boring Old Testament passage imaginable here) - and is cringe-inducing.
Part II: Of Commonwealth (15 chapters). Given the argument in Part I, Hobbes derives the necessity of an absolute sovereign, lays out the sovereign's rights (which are essentially unlimited), and describes the three types of commonwealth (monarchy, aristocracy, democracy). He argues monarchy is best because the monarch's private interest is most closely aligned with the public interest.
Personal opinion: the only portion of this book actually worth anything.
Part III: Of a Christian Commonwealth (11 chapters). Hobbes argues that religious authority must be subordinate to civil authority in a Christian society. This part is a lot of biblical interpretation, most of which is only interesting if you care about the 17th-century debate over church-state relations.
Personal opinion: worthless, skip.
Part IV: Of the Kingdom of Darkness (4 chapters). A polemic against the Catholic Church and Aristotelian philosophy, both of which Hobbes blames for confusing people about the proper relationship between religious and civil authority.
Personal opinion: if reading a 17th-century philosopher score some hits on the Pope is your idea of "fun" reading, then (a) Part IV is definitely for you, and (b) you should check yourself into a mental hospital, because you are not okay.
The Passages Worth Underlining
A few of the passages that stopped us:
On the desire for power (Chapter 11):
So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.
This is the anthropological premise of the whole book. Hobbes is not saying humans are evil - he is saying humans are driven, and a world of driven people without a common referee is a world at war.
On the state of nature (Chapter 13):
In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain... no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
The most famous sentence in the book. Worth reading in context - the argument is that everything worthwhile in human life (industry, arts, letters, society) requires predictability, and predictability requires an enforcer.
On the social contract (Chapter 17):
This is the generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather (to speak more reverently) of that mortal god to which we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and defence.
The image the whole book takes its name from. The famous frontispiece of the 1651 edition shows a giant crowned king whose body is made of hundreds of tiny individual people - the sovereign as the literal composite of all his subjects.
On liberty (Chapter 21):
The liberty of a subject lieth therefore only in those things which, in regulating their actions, the sovereign hath praetermitted [omitted]: such as is 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.
Freedom is whatever the sovereign has not made a law about. This is the definition of liberty that makes modern readers most uncomfortable, and probably the one that is most philosophically distant from what we mean by liberty today.
The One Exception: Self-Preservation
Hobbes "gives" the sovereign nearly unlimited power. But there is one right the sovereign cannot take away, because it is the entire reason people submit to the sovereign in the first place - the right of self-preservation.
From Chapter 21:
If the sovereign command a man (though justly condemned) to kill, wound, or maim himself; or not to resist those that assault him; or to abstain from the use of food, air, medicine, or any other thing without which he cannot live, yet hath that man the liberty to disobey.
This is the entire modern human-rights tradition in embryo. It is also a very narrow exception. You can refuse to kill yourself. You cannot refuse to be taxed, censored, drafted, or otherwise regulated.
Why Read This In 2025
Reading Hobbes today is uncomfortable because his framing is almost the exact opposite of modern political intuition.
We tend to worry about state overreach - the risk that the sovereign will have too much power. Hobbes worried about state collapse - the risk that the sovereign will have too little.
In a country that has been at war with itself, Hobbes's worry is the more urgent one.
The reason to read the book anyway is that it clarifies what liberal democracy is for. Liberal democracy is a very particular set of institutions that try to prevent both failure modes - both state overreach and state collapse - by dividing sovereignty across branches, making the sovereign accountable to elections, and constraining the sovereign with a bill of rights. When you understand Hobbes, you understand what all those institutional constraints are working against. They are working against the pull toward either total sovereignty or none.
You can disagree with Hobbes's conclusions (we do, almost universally) and still find his framing of the problem useful. Political institutions have to solve the problem Hobbes identified: how do we get out of the state of nature without ending up with a tyrant? The modern answer is elaborate and multi-layered, and it mostly works. But it is worth remembering that the alternative Hobbes was writing about - a country tearing itself apart - is not a thought experiment. It happens, in living memory of some readers of this blog, in several countries.
References
- Our wiki notes: Leviathan
- Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. 1651. The Penguin Classics edition edited by C. B. Macpherson is our standard recommendation.
- Companion post on political theory: Reading Rick Perlstein's Nixonland