Hobbes’s Moral and Political Philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) 8/07/20, 9:32 PM

1. Major Political Writings

Hobbes wrote several versions of his political philosophy, including The
Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (also under the titles Human Nature
and De Corpore Politico) published in 1650, De Cive (1642) published in
English as Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society in
1651, the English Leviathan published in 1651, and its Latin revision in 1668.
Others of his works are also important in understanding his political
philosophy, especially his history of the English Civil War, Behemoth
(published 1679), De Corpore (1655), De Homine (1658), Dialogue Between
a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England (1681), and
The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance (1656). All of
Hobbes’s major writings are collected in The English Works of Thomas
Hobbes, edited by Sir William Molesworth (11 volumes, London 1839–45),
and Thomae Hobbes Opera Philosophica Quae Latina Scripsit Omnia, also
edited by Molesworth (5 volumes; London, 1839–45). Oxford University
Press has undertaken a projected 26 volume collection of the Clarendon
Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes. So far 3 volumes are available: De
Cive (edited by Howard Warrender), The Correspondence of Thomas
Hobbes (edited by Noel Malcolm), and Writings on Common Law and
Hereditary Right (edited by Alan Cromartie and Quentin Skinner). Recently
Noel Malcolm has published a three volume edition of Leviathan, which
places the English text side by side with Hobbes’s later Latin version of it.
Readers new to Hobbes should begin with Leviathan, being sure to read
Parts Three and Four, as well as the more familiar and often excerpted Parts
One and Two. There are many fine overviews of Hobbes’s normative
philosophy, some of which are listed in the following selected bibliography
of secondary works.

2. The Philosophical Project

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Hobbes sought to discover rational principles for the construction of a civil

polity that would not be subject to destruction from within. Having lived
through the period of political disintegration culminating in the English Civil
War, he came to the view that the burdens of even the most oppressive
government are “scarce sensible, in respect of the miseries, and horrible
calamities, that accompany a Civill Warre”. Because virtually any
government would be better than a civil war, and, according to Hobbes’s
analysis, all but absolute governments are systematically prone to
dissolution into civil war, people ought to submit themselves to an absolute
political authority. Continued stability will require that they also refrain from
the sorts of actions that might undermine such a regime. For example,
subjects should not dispute the sovereign power and under no
circumstances should they rebel. In general, Hobbes aimed to demonstrate
the reciprocal relationship between political obedience and peace.

3. The State of Nature

To establish these conclusions, Hobbes invites us to consider what life
would be like in a state of nature, that is, a condition without government.
Perhaps we would imagine that people might fare best in such a state,
where each decides for herself how to act, and is judge, jury and
executioner in her own case whenever disputes arise—and that at any rate,
this state is the appropriate baseline against which to judge the justifiability
of political arrangements. Hobbes terms this situation “the condition of
mere nature”, a state of perfectly private judgment, in which there is no
agency with recognized authority to arbitrate disputes and effective power
to enforce its decisions.

Hobbes’s near descendant, John Locke, insisted in his Second Treatise of

Government that the state of nature was indeed to be preferred to
subjection to the arbitrary power of an absolute sovereign. But Hobbes

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famously argued that such a “dissolute condition of masterlesse men,

without subjection to Lawes, and a coercive Power to tye their hands from
rapine, and revenge” would make impossible all of the basic security upon
which comfortable, sociable, civilized life depends. There would be “no
place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently
no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may
be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving
and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face
of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; and which is worst of
all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man,
solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” If this is the state of nature,
people have strong reasons to avoid it, which can be done only by
submitting to some mutually recognized public authority, for “so long a man
is in the condition of mere nature, (which is a condition of war,) as private
appetite is the measure of good and evill.”

Although many readers have criticized Hobbes’s state of nature as unduly

pessimistic, he constructs it from a number of individually plausible
empirical and normative assumptions. He assumes that people are
sufficiently similar in their mental and physical attributes that no one is
invulnerable nor can expect to be able to dominate the others. Hobbes
assumes that people generally “shun death”, and that the desire to preserve
their own lives is very strong in most people. While people have local
affections, their benevolence is limited, and they have a tendency to
partiality. Concerned that others should agree with their own high opinions
of themselves, people are sensitive to slights. They make evaluative
judgments, but often use seemingly impersonal terms like ‘good’ and ‘bad’
to stand for their own personal preferences. They are curious about the
causes of events, and anxious about their futures; according to Hobbes,
these characteristics incline people to adopt religious beliefs, although the

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content of those beliefs will differ depending upon the sort of religious
education one has happened to receive.

With respect to normative assumptions, Hobbes ascribes to each person in

the state of nature a liberty right to preserve herself, which he terms “the
right of nature”. This is the right to do whatever one sincerely judges
needful for one’s preservation; yet because it is at least possible that
virtually anything might be judged necessary for one’s preservation, this
theoretically limited right of nature becomes in practice an unlimited right to
potentially anything, or, as Hobbes puts it, a right “to all things”. Hobbes
further assumes as a principle of practical rationality, that people should
adopt what they see to be the necessary means to their most important
ends.

4. The State of Nature Is a State of War

Taken together, these plausible descriptive and normative assumptions
yield a state of nature potentially fraught with divisive struggle. The right of
each to all things invites serious conflict, especially if there is competition
for resources, as there will surely be over at least scarce goods such as the
most desirable lands, spouses, etc. People will quite naturally fear that
others may (citing the right of nature) invade them, and may rationally plan
to strike first as an anticipatory defense. Moreover, that minority of prideful
or “vain-glorious” persons who take pleasure in exercising power over
others will naturally elicit preemptive defensive responses from others.
Conflict will be further fueled by disagreement in religious views, in moral
judgments, and over matters as mundane as what goods one actually
needs, and what respect one properly merits. Hobbes imagines a state of
nature in which each person is free to decide for herself what she needs,
what she’s owed, what’s respectful, right, pious, prudent, and also free to
decide all of these questions for the behavior of everyone else as well, and

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to act on her judgments as she thinks best, enforcing her views where she
can. In this situation where there is no common authority to resolve these
many and serious disputes, we can easily imagine with Hobbes that the
state of nature would become a “state of war”, even worse, a war of “all
against all”.

5. Further Questions About the State of Nature

In response to the natural question whether humanity ever was generally in
any such state of nature, Hobbes gives three examples of putative states of
nature. First, he notes that all sovereigns are in this state with respect to
one another. This claim has made Hobbes the representative example of a
“realist” in international relations. Second, he opined that many now
civilized peoples were formerly in that state, and some few peoples—“the
savage people in many places of America” (Leviathan, XIII), for instance—
were still to his day in the state of nature. Third and most significantly,
Hobbes asserts that the state of nature will be easily recognized by those
whose formerly peaceful states have collapsed into civil war. While the state
of nature’s condition of perfectly private judgment is an abstraction,
something resembling it too closely for comfort remains a perpetually
present possibility, to be feared, and avoided.

Do the other assumptions of Hobbes’s philosophy license the existence of

this imagined state of isolated individuals pursuing their private judgments?
Probably not, since, as feminist critics among others have noted, children
are by Hobbes’s theory assumed to have undertaken an obligation of
obedience to their parents in exchange for nurturing, and so the primitive
units in the state of nature will include families ordered by internal
obligations, as well as individuals. The bonds of affection, sexual affinity,
and friendship—as well as of clan membership and shared religious belief—
may further decrease the accuracy of any purely individualistic model of the

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state of nature. This concession need not impugn Hobbes’s analysis of

conflict in the state of nature, since it may turn out that competition,
diffidence and glory-seeking are disastrous sources of conflicts among
small groups just as much as they are among individuals. Still,
commentators seeking to answer the question how precisely we should
understand Hobbes’s state of nature are investigating the degree to which
Hobbes imagines that to be a condition of interaction among isolated
individuals.

Another important open question is that of what, exactly, it is about human

beings that makes it the case (supposing Hobbes is right) that our
communal life is prone to disaster when we are left to interact according
only to our own individual judgments. Perhaps, while people do wish to act
for their own best long-term interest, they are shortsighted, and so indulge
their current interests without properly considering the effects of their
current behavior on their long-term interest. This would be a type of failure
of rationality. Alternatively, it may be that people in the state of nature are
fully rational, but are trapped in a situation that makes it individually rational
for each to act in a way that is sub-optimal for all, perhaps finding
themselves in the familiar ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ of game theory. Or again, it
may be that Hobbes’s state of nature would be peaceful but for the
presence of persons (just a few, or perhaps all, to some degree) whose
passions overrule their calmer judgments; who are prideful, spiteful, partial,
envious, jealous, and in other ways prone to behave in ways that lead to war.
Such an account would understand irrational human passions to be the
source of conflict. Which, if any, of these accounts adequately answers to
Hobbes’s text is a matter of continuing debate among Hobbes scholars.
Game theorists have been particularly active in these debates,
experimenting with different models for the state of nature and the conflict
it engenders.

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6. The Laws of Nature

Hobbes argues that the state of nature is a miserable state of war in which
none of our important human ends are reliably realizable. Happily, human
nature also provides resources to escape this miserable condition. Hobbes
argues that each of us, as a rational being, can see that a war of all against
all is inimical to the satisfaction of her interests, and so can agree that
“peace is good, and therefore also the way or means of peace are good”.
Humans will recognize as imperatives the injunction to seek peace, and to
do those things necessary to secure it, when they can do so safely. Hobbes
calls these practical imperatives “Lawes of Nature”, the sum of which is not
to treat others in ways we would not have them treat us. These “precepts”,
“conclusions” or “theorems” of reason are “eternal and immutable”, always
commanding our assent even when they may not safely be acted upon.
They forbid many familiar vices such as iniquity, cruelty, and ingratitude.
Although commentators do not agree on whether these laws should be
regarded as mere precepts of prudence, or rather as divine commands, or
moral imperatives of some other sort, all agree that Hobbes understands
them to direct people to submit to political authority. They tell us to seek
peace with willing others by laying down part of our “right to all things”, by
mutually covenanting to submit to the authority of a sovereign, and further
direct us to keep that covenant establishing sovereignty.

7. Establishing Sovereign Authority

When people mutually covenant each to the others to obey a common
authority, they have established what Hobbes calls “sovereignty by
institution”. When, threatened by a conqueror, they covenant for protection
by promising obedience, they have established “sovereignty by acquisition”.
These are equally legitimate ways of establishing sovereignty, according to
Hobbes, and their underlying motivation is the same—namely fear—
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whether of one’s fellows or of a conqueror. The social covenant involves

both the renunciation or transfer of right and the authorization of the
sovereign power. Political legitimacy depends not on how a government
came to power, but only on whether it can effectively protect those who
have consented to obey it; political obligation ends when protection ceases.

8. Absolutism
Although Hobbes offered some mild pragmatic grounds for preferring
monarchy to other forms of government, his main concern was to argue
that effective government—whatever its form—must have absolute
authority. Its powers must be neither divided nor limited. The powers of
legislation, adjudication, enforcement, taxation, war-making (and the less
familiar right of control of normative doctrine) are connected in such a way
that a loss of one may thwart effective exercise of the rest; for example,
legislation without interpretation and enforcement will not serve to regulate
conduct. Only a government that possesses all of what Hobbes terms the
“essential rights of sovereignty” can be reliably effective, since where
partial sets of these rights are held by different bodies that disagree in their
judgments as to what is to be done, paralysis of effective government, or
degeneration into a civil war to settle their dispute, may occur.

Similarly, to impose limitation on the authority of the government is to invite

irresoluble disputes over whether it has overstepped those limits. If each
person is to decide for herself whether the government should be obeyed,
factional disagreement—and war to settle the issue, or at least paralysis of
effective government—are quite possible. To refer resolution of the
question to some further authority, itself also limited and so open to
challenge for overstepping its bounds, would be to initiate an infinite
regress of non-authoritative ‘authorities’ (where the buck never stops). To
refer it to a further authority itself unlimited, would be just to relocate the

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seat of absolute sovereignty, a position entirely consistent with Hobbes’s

insistence on absolutism. To avoid the horrible prospect of governmental
collapse and return to the state of nature, people should treat their
sovereign as having absolute authority.

9. Responsibility and the Limits of Political

Obligation
When subjects institute a sovereign by authorizing it, they agree, in
conformity with the principle “no wrong is done to a consenting party”, not
to hold it liable for any errors in judgment it may make and not to treat any
harms it does to them as actionable injustices. Although many interpreters
have assumed that by authorizing a sovereign, subjects become morally
responsible for the actions it commands, Hobbes instead insists that “the
external actions done in obedience to [laws], without the inward
approbation, are the actions of the sovereign, and not of the subject, which
is in that case but as an instrument, without any motion of his own at all”
(Leviathan xlii, 106). It may be important to Hobbes’s project of persuading
his Christian readers to obey their sovereign that he can reassure them that
God will not hold them responsible for wrongful actions done at the
sovereign’s command, because they cannot reasonably be expected to
obey if doing so would jeopardize their eternal prospects. Hence Hobbes
explains that “whatsoever a subject...is compelled to do in obedience to his
sovereign, and doth it not in order to his own mind, but in order to the laws
of his country, that action is not his, but his sovereign’s.” (Leviathan xlii. 11)
This position reinforces absolutism by permitting Hobbes to maintain that
subjects can obey even commands to perform actions they believe to be
sinful without fear of divine punishment.

While Hobbes insists that we should regard our governments as having

absolute authority, he reserves to subjects the liberty of disobeying some of

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their government’s commands. He argues that subjects retain a right of

self-defense against the sovereign power, giving them the right to disobey
or resist when their lives are in danger. He also gives them seemingly broad
resistance rights in cases in which their families or even their honor are at
stake. These exceptions have understandably intrigued those who study
Hobbes. His ascription of apparently inalienable rights—what he calls the
“true liberties of subjects”—seems incompatible with his defense of
absolute sovereignty. Moreover, if the sovereign’s failure to provide
adequate protection to subjects extinguishes their obligation to obey, and if
it is left to each subject to judge for herself the adequacy of that protection,
it seems that people have never really exited the fearsome state of nature.
This aspect of Hobbes’s political philosophy has been hotly debated ever
since Hobbes’s time. Bishop Bramhall, one of Hobbes’s contemporaries,
famously accused Leviathan of being a “Rebell’s Catechism.” More recently,
some commentators have argued that Hobbes’s discussion of the limits of
political obligation is the Achilles’ heel of his theory. It is not clear whether
or not this charge can stand up to scrutiny, but it will surely be the subject
of much continued discussion.

10. Religion and Social Instability

The last crucial aspect of Hobbes’s political philosophy is his treatment of
religion. Hobbes progressively expands his discussion of Christian religion
in each revision of his political philosophy, until it comes in Leviathan to
comprise roughly half the book. There is no settled consensus on how
Hobbes understands the significance of religion within his political theory.
Some commentators have argued that Hobbes is trying to demonstrate to
his readers the compatibility of his political theory with core Christian
commitments, since it may seem that Christians’ religious duties forbid their
affording the sort of absolute obedience to their governors which Hobbes’s

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theory requires of them. Others have doubted the sincerity of his professed
Christianity, arguing that by the use of irony or other subtle rhetorical
devices, Hobbes sought to undermine his readers’ religious beliefs.
Howsoever his intentions are properly understood, Hobbes’s obvious
concern with the power of religious belief is a fact that interpreters of his
political philosophy must seek to explain.

11. Hobbes on Women and the Family

Scholars are increasingly interested in how Hobbes thought of the status of
women, and of the family. Hobbes was one of the earliest western
philosophers to count women as persons when devising a social contract
among persons. He insists on the equality of all people, very explicitly
including women. People are equal because they are all subject to
domination, and all potentially capable of dominating others. No person is
so strong as to be invulnerable to attack while sleeping by the concerted
efforts of others, nor is any so strong as to be assured of dominating all
others.

In this relevant sense, women are naturally equal to men. They are equally
naturally free, meaning that their consent is required before they will be
under the authority of anyone else. In this, Hobbes’s claims stand in stark
contrast to many prevailing views of the time, according to which women
were born inferior to and subordinate to men. Sir Robert Filmer, who later
served as the target of John Locke’s First Treatise of Government, is a well-
known proponent of this view, which he calls patriarchalism. Explicitly
rejecting the patriarchalist view as well as Salic law, Hobbes maintains that
women can be sovereigns; authority for him is “neither male nor female”. He
also argues for natural maternal right: in the state of nature, dominion over
children is naturally the mother’s. He witnesses the Amazons.

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In seeming contrast to this egalitarian foundation, Hobbes spoke of the

commonwealth in patriarchal language. In the move from the state of nature
to civil society, families are described as “fathers”, “servants”, and
“children”, seemingly obliterating mothers from the picture entirely. Hobbes
justifies this way of talking by saying that it is fathers not mothers who have
founded societies. As true as that is, it is easy to see how there is a lively
debate between those who emphasize the potentially feminist or egalitarian
aspects of Hobbes’s thought and those who emphasize his ultimate
exclusion of women. Such debates raise the question: To what extent are
the patriarchal claims Hobbes makes integral to his overall theory, if indeed
they are integral at all?

Bibliography
The secondary literature on Hobbes’s moral and political philosophy (not to
speak of his entire body of work) is vast, appearing across many disciplines
and in many languages. The following is a narrow selection of fairly recent
works by philosophers, political theorists, and intellectual historians,
available in English, on main areas of inquiry in Hobbes’s moral and political
thought. Very helpful for further reference is the critical bibliography of
Hobbes scholarship to 1990 contained in Zagorin, P., 1990, “Hobbes on Our
Mind”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 51(2).

Journals

Hobbes Studies is an annually published journal devoted to scholarly

research on all aspects of Hobbes’s work.

Collections

Brown, K.C. (ed.), 1965, Hobbes Studies, Cambridge: Harvard University

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Press, contains important papers by A.E. Taylor, J.W. N. Watkins, Howard

Warrender, and John Plamenatz, among others.
Caws, P. (ed.), 1989, The Causes of Quarrell: Essays on Peace, War, and
Thomas Hobbes, Boston: Beacon Press.
Courtland, S. (ed.), 2017, Hobbesian Applied Ethics and Public Policy, New
York: Routledge.
Dietz, M. (ed.), 1990, Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory, Lawrence:
University of Kansas Press.
Dyzenhaus, D. and T. Poole (eds.), 2013, Hobbes and the Law, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Finkelstein, C. (ed.), 2005, Hobbes on Law, Aldershot: Ashgate.
Hirschmann, N. and J. Wright (eds.), 2012, Feminist Interpretations of
Thomas Hobbes, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Lloyd, S.A., 2012, Hobbes Today: Insights for the 21st Century, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
–––, 2013, The Bloomsbury Companion to Hobbes, London: Bloomsbury.
–––, forthcoming, Interpretations of Hobbes’ Political Theory, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Lloyd, S.A. (ed.), 2001, “Special Issue on Recent Work on the Moral and
Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 82
(3&4).
Martinich, A.P. and Kinch Hoekstra (eds.), 2016, The Oxford Handbook of
Hobbes, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rogers, G.A.J. and A. Ryan (eds.), 1988, Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rogers, G.A.J. (ed.), 1995, Leviathan: Contemporary Responses to the
Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes, Bristol: Thoemmes Press.
Rogers, G.A.J. and T. Sorell (eds.), 2000, Hobbes and History. London:
Routledge.
Shaver, R. (ed.), 1999, Hobbes, Hanover: Dartmouth Press.

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Sorell, T. (ed.), 1996, The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.
Sorell, T., and L. Foisneau (eds.), 2004, Leviathan after 350 years, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Sorell, T. and G.A.J. Rogers (eds.), 2000, Hobbes and History, London:
Routledge.
Springboard, P. (ed.), 2007, The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s
Leviathan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Books and Articles

Abizadeh, A., 2011, “Hobbes on the Causes of War: A Disagreement

Theory”, American Political Science Review, 105 (2): 298–315.
Armitage, D., 2007, “Hobbes and the foundations of modern international
thought”, in Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ashcraft, R., 1971, “Hobbes’s Natural Man: A Study in Ideology Formation”,
Journal of Politics, 33: 1076–1117.
–––, 2010, “Slavery Discourse before the Restoration: The Barbary Coast,
Justinian’s Digest, and Hobbes’s Political Theory”, History of European
Ideas, 36 (2): 412–418.
Baumgold, D., 1988, Hobbes’s Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Baumgold, D., 2013, “Trust in Hobbes’s Political Thought”, Political Theory,
41(6): 835–55.
Bobbio, N., 1993, Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Boonin-Vail, D., 1994, Thomas Hobbes and the Science of Moral Virtue,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Byron, M., 2015, Submission and Subjection in Leviathan: Good Subjects in

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the Hobbbesian Commonwealth, Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave

MacMillan.
Collins, J., 2005, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Curley, E., 1988, “I durst not write so boldly: or how to read Hobbes’
theological-political treatise”, E. Giancotti (ed.), Proceedings of the
Conference on Hobbes and Spinoza, Urbino.
–––, 1994, “Introduction to Hobbes’s Leviathan”, Leviathan with selected
variants from the Latin edition of 1668, E. Curley (ed.), Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press.
Curran, E., 2006, “Can Rights Curb the Hobbesian Sovereign? The Full Right
to Self-preservation, Duties of Sovereignty and the Limitations of Hohfeld”,
Law and Philosophy, 25: 243–265.
–––, 2007, Reclaiming the Rights of Hobbesian Subjects, Hampshire:
Palgrave Macmillan.
–––, 2013, “An Immodest Proposal: Hobbes Rather than Locke Provides a
Forerunner for Modern Rights Theory”, Law and Philosophy, 32 (4): 515–
538.
Darwall, S., 1995. The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’, 1640–1740,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
––– 2000, “Normativity and Projection in Hobbes’s Leviathan”, The
Philosophical Review, 109 (3): 313–347.
Ewin, R.E., 1991, Virtues and Rights: The Moral Philosophy of Thomas
Hobbes, Boulder: Westview Press.
Finn, S., 2006, Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Natural Philosophy,
London: Continuum Press.
Flathman, R., 1993, Thomas Hobbes: Skepticism, Individuality, and
Chastened Politics, Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Gauthier, D., 1969, The Logic of ‘Leviathan’: the Moral and political Theory
of Thomas Hobbes, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Gert, B., 1967, “Hobbes and psychological egoism”, Journal of the History
of Ideas, 28: 503–520.
––– 1978, “Introduction to Man and Citizen”, Man and Citizen, B. Gert, (ed.),
New York: Humanities Press.
––– 1988, “The law of nature and the moral law”, Hobbes Studies, 1: 26–44.
Goldsmith, M. M., 1966, Hobbes’s Science of Politics, New York: Columbia
University Press
Green, M., 2015, “Authorization and Political Authority in Hobbes”, Journal
of the History of Philosophy, 62(3): 25–47.
Hampton, J., 1986, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition, Cambridge:
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