‘Leviathan’: The High Cost of Peace
A review of ‘Leviathan’, by Thomas Hobbes; Penguin, 1651.
In times of war, said Thomas Hobbes (with all the charm of a funeral dirge), there exists ‘no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society;’ and – oh dear – the ever-present spectre of violent death. Man’s life, he wrote, is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. Written amid the liberal bloodletting of the English Civil War, Hobbes’s weighty treatise on the social contract asks after all a fairly simple question: how might one stop society collapsing into a universal melée of all against all? His answer, given with the dry finality of a guillotine blade, is the Leviathan: an all-powerful sovereign to whom we by choice surrender some of our liberties, lest we eat each other alive.
Leviathan is Hobbes’s masterwork and it stands out for many reasons — not least its title, which, unlike the blandly descriptive Reflections of Burke, evokes, rather than describes. The Leviathan of scripture is no gentle metaphor, but a ‘tortuous’, fire-snorting sea monster mentioned in Job and described as so unkillable that it must wait patiently for divine obliteration on Judgement Day, when God Himself slays it and casts it into the abyss. That Hobbes looked upon this apocalyptic beast and thought, yes, this will do nicely for a head of state, may raise your eyebrow, reader. But consider the setting: England in flames, Europe in the throes of sectarian violence. Against such a backdrop, Hobbes came to see peace not as an ideal, but as a last refuge; and if keeping the peace meant enthroning a monster, then – well, so be it. Better the rule of a beast than the chaos of men.
Hobbes lived through a time of bitter sectarian conflict, not only due to the English war but the European religious wars on the continent.
Never one to rush when he can lecture, Hobbes drags us through his bleak anatomy of human nature before getting to the point. For him, there is no need for souls, spirits, or anything else that cannot be weighed or measured. (How dull, by the way.) Everything — from thoughts to thunder — is just matter in motion. He is for this reason the first modern materialist, if not the first to be dreary about it. He also throws out the comforting idea that society should aim for some noble ‘greatest good.’ We want too many different things, he says; and trying to unite us under one single vision of the good is a fast track to civil war. The only thing we all fear is violent death. That, Hobbes says (with all the warmth of a firing squad), is the real enemy. And it is out of this fear — not virtue — that politics springs.
He risks painting himself into a corner; for he insists there is no highest good worth chasing, and that therefore utopias are a fantasy, but that life without society — his so-called ‘state of nature’ — is little more than a knife fight over scraps. In this state, we claw and scramble for whatever helps us get what we want, and the result is blood. What we actually need, Hobbes says, is a deal: everyone gives up just a little bit of freedom and, in return, we all get to live without having to look over our shoulder all the time. But such peace requires a referee —and one with teeth. Order, after all, does not bring about itself. So Hobbes hands over everything to the sovereign: he can assert his power over faith, succession, law, doctrine. He answers to no one; he cannot be called unjust; certainly he cannot be executed like poor Charlie I. In Hobbes’s world, peace comes at a price — and that price is absolute power in one pair of hands. A bargain, apparently, struck in fear rather than in trust.
What man requires is to live in a system in which he can safely renounce his claim on things because others do the same, and where a single authority is empowered to preserve order.
Hobbes wrote Leviathan in the style of his age, which is to say, with all the elegance of a brick wall. For many, that will be enough to kill the joy before it starts. Still, he did make an effort — or so he claimed — to stick to plain, familiar words, even if he often fell flat on that front. Amusingly, like Orwell after him, Hobbes couldn’t resist doing just what he scolded others for: in his case, loading his prose with metaphors, despite condemning them in his introduction. That said, his arguments are neat, almost obsessively so. He advances like a man assembling flat-pack furniture: starting with the parts, following the steps, never deviating. It is no surprise he is sometimes called the father of modern analytic philosophy, a field that worships clarity, structure, and the fantasy that reason alone can tidy up the human mess.
It is hard to overstate what Leviathan did to political thought. By laying out social contract theory, Hobbes set the stage for Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and a march of thinkers who would either build on or recoil from his ideas. Though painted as a staunch conservative, Hobbes was, by the standards of his time, frighteningly modern. He had no time for the divine right of kings, praised reason over tradition, and even proposed a tax system to support the unemployed — a suggestion that would have had many of his peers clutching their pearls. His grim view of human nature unsettled his contemporaries, and his phrase ‘war of all against all’ still echoes in the realist doctrines of international politics. Yet Leviathan remains a bleak book, not just in theory but in tone. Hobbes wrote it while watching his homeland tear itself apart from the safety of France. His view of mankind — and how best to keep it from eating itself — could only ever come out like this. As the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper summed it up: ‘The axiom, fear; the method, logic; the conclusion, despotism.’
