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Leviathan
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Leviathan is Thomas Hobbes's 1651 work of political philosophy, written in the aftermath of the English Civil War, arguing that without a strong central sovereign authority human life in the state of nature would be, in Hobbes's own words, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," and that individuals must surrender certain freedoms to an absolute sovereign in exchange for peace and security through a social contract.
Facts
Key ProvisionArgues that without a sovereign to keep them in awe, individuals in the state of nature live in a perpetual war of every man against every man; reason therefore dictates that they covenant together to transfer their natural right of self-government to an absolute sovereign, the Leviathan, whose authority cannot lawfully be divided or resisted once granted. 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Drafted By
Hobbes wrote Leviathan during his exile in Paris, publishing it in 1651 after returning to England.
Influenced
In the Other Atlases
- Also in Philosophy Atlas: Leviathan, the same subject.
Sources
Dissenting Readings (1 dissenting reading)
Description
The traditional reading takes Leviathan at face value as a defense of absolute, undivided sovereign authority for its own sake, grounded in a psychological account of self-interested individuals fleeing a state of nature. C. B. Macpherson's influential 20th-century reading instead treats Hobbes's individuals as already market-society actors, so that the sovereign's absolute power is less a claim about legitimate authority in general than the logical output of possessive individualism, a proto-liberal argument in absolutist clothing. Other Hobbes scholars reject this as reading 17th-century political theory through 20th-century categories Hobbes did not share, and hold the absolutist claim was meant, and should be read, literally.
A dissenting reading, from C. B. Macpherson's possessive-individualist reading of HobbesThomas Hobbes (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
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