wunder beta🐋 Hobbes's Leviathan: fear, covenant, and the mortal god
A crowned giant stands over a landscape with a sword and a bishop's crook, and his body is built from hundreds of people with their backs turned to you. What Hobbes actually wrote about the state of nature, why the sovereign makes no promise to anybody, why he insisted a frightened man is a free man, and the October morning in 1666 when the House of Commons named the book by title.
What you’ll learn
- A political theory born from civil warRead the 1651 frontispiece as a diagram of the book’s problem, and place Leviathan inside the collapse of English authority its author watched from exile.A giant assembled from hundreds of people, holding a sword and a crozier, published by a man who spent eleven years abroad while his country tried and executed its king.
- Human motion, desire, and conflictFollow Hobbes’s account of action from endeavour to appetite to will, and see why the restless desire of power is an argument about insecurity rather than greed.He builds politics on a physics of motion — but the trouble he diagnoses lies in the situation people stand in, not in their characters.
- The state of natureDistinguish the state of nature from a story about primitive violence, and weigh the three kinds of evidence Hobbes offers that it is a real condition.War is a known disposition across a stretch of time, like a spell of bad weather; rough equality and mutual mistrust produce it without anyone having to be wicked.
- Covenant and sovereign powerTrace the covenant precisely — who promises what to whom — and see how the sovereign’s absence from that promise produces the sovereign’s unaccountability.Reason finds the route to peace and then stops, because walking it alone is fatal; the commonwealth is generated by every man covenanting with every man, and with no one else.
- Liberty, law, and religionCompare Hobbes’s physical definition of liberty with the self-rule definitions he is arguing against, and follow his alarm at divided civil and religious command.Freedom is the absence of external impediments, which makes fear and liberty consistent and leaves a subject’s real freedom sitting in the silence of the law.
- The book’s argument and its limitsIdentify the limits Hobbes builds into his own absolutism — self-defence, the conscription exceptions, the protection clause — and see what the book cost him.The right to resist force cannot be transferred, and obedience lasts exactly as long as the protection that justified it; in 1666 the Commons named the book by title.
Questions this course answers
Why did Hobbes name his commonwealth after the Leviathan of the Book of Job?
The plate quotes Job 41 in Latin, and in chapter 28 Hobbes cites the passage directly — then adds at once that this Leviathan is mortal and subject to decay.
What does the frontispiece show beneath the giant, and why is it arranged that way?
The pairing states the book’s central worry visually: two kinds of command with parallel weapons, which is exactly why the giant must be holding both the sword and the crozier.
Hobbes says all people have “a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power”. What reason does he give for it?
He rules out the greed reading in the very next sentence: the cause is not always hope of more delight, but the impossibility of securing what you already hold.
What does Hobbes mean by saying the will is “the last appetite in deliberating”?
This keeps his psychology continuous with his physics — action comes out of motion, not out of a faculty standing outside it.
Why does Hobbes compare a condition of war to foul weather?
His definition turns on time and expectation: war “consisteth not in Battell onely… but in a tract of time, wherein the Will to contend by Battell is sufficiently known”.
Which of Hobbes’s three causes of quarrel explains a peaceable person striking first?
Diffidence is the cause that needs no bad character at all. It is what a reasonable person does when they cannot be sure the other will hold back.
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