Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes - Part 1

Thomas Hobbes' seminal masterpiece, Leviathan, a long treatise on social contract and legitimate government in a commonwealth, was published in London in 1651, as the great English republican experiment was beginning. He had just returned from nearly a decade living in exile in Europe, escaping from the long turmoil of the civil war between the English Parliament and the Crown. Leviathan was his answer to that catastrophic period of social churn, hoping that his ideas would serve as a guide for establishing and maintaining peaceful civic relationships between the people and its sovereign authority.

Hobbes was born in Malmsbury, Wiltshire in 1588, at the time of the Spanish Armada threat to England. His mother would say that fear of the invasion was the cause of his premature birth. He was educated at a private school in Westport, followed by periods of study at both Oxford and Cambridge universities. After he graduated he was employed by members of the aristocratic Cavendish family with whom he remained for decades. It was while living and travelling with this family that he became attached to the Royalist cause.

During the time of political agitation, leading into the English Civil War and culminating in the execution of Charles I, Hobbes developed his views on the nature of Sovereign Authority and social contracts. His first major work on the subject, De Cive, published in 1647, contained many of his core ideas, which he continued to develop and which he later presented in a more expanded form in the work that became known as Leviathan.

In the work, Hobbes takes issue with the teleological principles found in the political theories of Aristotle, who considered that, by and large, the actions of mankind tended towards a beneficial purpose. Hobbes, on the other hand, thought a man's actions stemmed rather from a natural desire to avoid harm or danger or death. According to Hobbes, a man in his natural state, is constantly at war, either defending himself, his family and his goods against predation by his stronger neighbours or in acting aggressively towards those weaker than himself.

In order to avoid this perpetual warring state of each man against another, men agree to make social contracts either with a powerful One, who is given the title of Sovereign or with a group of individuals acting together as a single sovereign body, to whom, in return for the giving up of certain individual liberties, they invest supreme authority over themselves, in the hope that the Sovereign Authority thus created will establish and maintain a stable and lasting peace free from fear of war or predation.

Hobbes considered his works to be the start of a new form of political science in an age where other original thinkers in their different fields (Galileo, Harvey, Descartes) were also developing new ideas to instruct and inspire succeeding generations of scientists and philosophers.

Hobbes died in 1679 at the age of 91.