Hobbes's Social Contract: State of Nature & the Sovereign

1. Fear and the Science of Politics

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) lived through one of the most violent periods in English history: the English Civil War. This experience of societal collapse profoundly shaped his philosophy. He famously wrote that on the day of his birth, as the Spanish Armada threatened England, "my mother gave birth to twins: myself and fear." For Hobbes, the avoidance of violent death is the paramount human concern, and the primary purpose of political society is to provide security from this ultimate evil.

To understand Hobbes's solution, we must first appreciate his radical methodology, which was deeply influenced by the scientific revolution of his time. Let's begin with a video that sets this historical and intellectual scene.

Hobbes believed that the chaos he witnessed was a product of flawed, unscientific political thinking. His ambition was to create a true "science of politics" by applying the same rigorous, deductive methods that Galileo had applied to physics. This meant breaking society down to its fundamental constituents—individual human beings—and analyzing their nature as if they were complex machines.

2. Human Nature: A Machine in Motion

The first part of Leviathan is titled "Of Man," and it lays the foundation for everything that follows. For Hobbes, a human being is a purely material entity, a complex system of matter in motion. There is no incorporeal soul; thoughts, feelings, and desires are all physical processes in the brain and body.

Let's explore this mechanistic psychology.

This picture of human nature is the set of initial conditions for Hobbes's political model. He defines a human as a self-interested, power-seeking automaton whose primary goal is survival and whose reason is a tool for achieving that goal. What happens when you place a multitude of such beings together without any overarching authority?

3. The State of Nature: A War of All Against All

From his axioms of human nature, Hobbes deduces the condition he calls the state of nature. This is not necessarily a historical claim about a prehistoric era, but a thought experiment: what would life be like if there were no government, no laws, and no police to enforce them?

His conclusion is grim. The state of nature is a state of war, not necessarily of constant fighting, but of the constant will to fight. Life in this state, he famously writes, is "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."

Why is this so? Hobbes identifies three principal causes of quarrel:

1. Competition: For limited resources, individuals will use violence to make themselves masters of other persons and property.
2. Diffidence (Distrust): Since everyone is a potential threat, the most rational course of action is a preemptive strike. For safety, one must anticipate attack by attacking first.
3. Glory: Humans desire not just resources but also reputation. We will fight over trifles—a word, a smile, a different opinion—that we perceive as signs of disrespect.

The foundation of this conflict is a fundamental equality. Though some are stronger or quicker-witted than others, "the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others." No one is safe; everyone is a potential threat to everyone else.

This scenario is elegantly modeled by the Prisoner's Dilemma from game theory, a framework you've likely encountered.

As the article explains, in a one-off interaction between two self-interested agents (as in the state of nature), the rational strategy for each individual is to betray the other, even though mutual cooperation would lead to a better collective outcome. Extrapolating this to a society of N individuals, the logical result is a persistent state of mutual distrust and conflict. Without an external power to enforce agreements, cooperation is irrational.

4. The Social Contract: Escaping the State of Nature

If the state of nature is so terrible, how do we escape it? Hobbes argues that the solution is found within human nature itself. While some passions incline us to war, others incline us to peace: primarily, the fear of death and the desire for a more commodious life. And reason suggests convenient "Articles of Peace," which Hobbes calls the Laws of Nature.

It is crucial to distinguish between the Right of Nature and the Laws of Nature.

• The Right of Nature (jus naturale): In the state of nature, every person has the liberty to use their own power for their own preservation. Because anything might be a useful means to that end, this amounts to a right to everything, including another person's body.
• The Laws of Nature (lex naturalis): These are precepts, or general rules, found out by reason, by which a person is forbidden to do that which is destructive of their life.

The first two laws of nature are the most important for establishing peace:

1. First Law: Every person ought to seek peace, as far as they have hope of obtaining it; and when they cannot obtain it, they may seek and use all helps and advantages of war.
2. Second Law: A person should be willing, when others are so too, to lay down this right to all things, and be contented with so much liberty against other people as they would allow other people against themselves.

This second law is the core of the social contract. It is a mutual renunciation and transference of rights. I give up my right to attack you, on the condition that you give up your right to attack me. However, a problem remains. As we saw with the Prisoner's Dilemma, such a contract ("covenant" in Hobbes's language) is unstable. If I fear you will break the pact, it is rational for me to break it first. As Hobbes states, "Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure a man at all."

5. The Leviathan: The Sovereign Authority

The only way to make the contract binding is to create a common power to enforce it—an entity so powerful that everyone is terrified of disobeying it. This is how the commonwealth, the great LEVIATHAN, is born.

The social contract is not an agreement between the people and a ruler. It is an agreement among the people themselves to give up their right of governing themselves to a single person or an assembly of persons (the Sovereign).

This act of creation is best visualized by the famous frontispiece to Hobbes's book.

The mechanism that creates the sovereign is authorization. Each individual authorizes all the actions of the sovereign as if they were their own.

This concept of authorization has profound consequences:

• The sovereign is not a party to the contract, so they cannot break it.
• Whatever the sovereign does cannot be an "injury" to the subjects, because every subject is the author of the sovereign's act. To punish the sovereign would be to punish another for one's own actions.
• The sovereign's power must be absolute and indivisible. To divide power (e.g., between a king and a parliament) is to create factions that will lead back to civil war.

The sovereign's role is to enforce the social contract and the laws of nature, thereby providing the peace and security that make life, industry, and culture possible. The liberty of the subject exists only in areas where the sovereign has not made a law (the "silence of the law"). However, one right is inalienable: the right to self-preservation. If the sovereign commands you to kill yourself, you are not bound to obey, because the entire purpose of entering the contract was to preserve your life. This creates a fascinating tension at the heart of Hobbes's absolutism.

Let's watch a final video clip that summarizes the creation of the state and the rights of the sovereign.

Conclusion

We have now reconstructed Hobbes's monumental argument for political absolutism. It is a deductive chain that moves from a stark, mechanistic model of human nature to the necessity of a nearly all-powerful state.

• Key Takeaways:
  • Human Nature ("Is"): Humans are self-interested, materialistic machines driven by appetites and aversions, foremost among them the fear of death and the desire for power to ensure self-preservation.
  • State of Nature: As a logical deduction from human nature, a life without a common power is a "war of all against all," characterized by competition, distrust, and a constant fear of violent death.
  • The Social Contract: Reason provides the Laws of Nature, which dictate that we should seek peace by mutually surrendering our natural right to everything.
  • The Sovereign ("Ought"): To enforce this contract, the people agree among themselves to authorize a sovereign (the Leviathan) with absolute and indivisible power. The sole purpose—and justification—of this sovereign is to provide peace and security, lifting humanity out of the nasty, brutish state of nature.

Hobbes's theory is a powerful, if unsettling, attempt to build a political "ought" on a scientific "is." Its premises and conclusions have been debated for centuries.

Preview of the Next Lesson:
Our next lesson will examine a very different answer to the question of political legitimacy, offered by John Locke. Locke also begins from a state of nature and uses a social contract, but his more optimistic view of human nature and his concept of inalienable natural rights lead him to a radically different conclusion: a government that is limited, accountable, and established to protect pre-existing rights to life, liberty, and property.