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Hobbes

Original nameThomas Hobbes

Author of Leviathan, founder of social contract theory

Asking Where Power Comes From · Political Thinkers
Political PhilosophySocial ContractLeviathanSovereignty

Who they are

An English political philosopher who lived through the bloody turmoil of the English Civil War. In Leviathan he advanced a far-reaching supposition: in a "state of nature" without government, man is a wolf to man, and life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." To escape this chaos, people can only covenant with one another, handing their power to a supreme sovereign (which he called "the Leviathan") in exchange for order and safety. He thus argued that even mighty sovereign power draws its legitimacy from the consent of the people, not from God — a step that opened the source of all modern political thought.

Primary sourcesHobbes, Leviathan (1651)

Key stories

"Man Is a Wolf to Man"

Hobbes supposed: if there were no government and no law, everyone would have a right to seize everything, and the result could only be "a war of all against all," in which no one is safe. It is precisely the fear of this terror that drives people to give up part of their freedom willingly, to covenant, and to obey a common sovereign together. With one cold premise, he for the first time grounded the state’s legitimacy in "the consent of the people" — even though the conclusion he reached was absolute monarchy.

Relationships

Echoes today

Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.

"Leviathan" as a metaphor for the state"Leviathan" became a universal metaphor for "the mighty state / sovereign," seen across political science and public debate; "the social contract" became the basic framework for understanding the legitimacy of the state.

Appears in