Leviathan
Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil
Tradition: Early modern political philosophy / materialist naturalism
The state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short; the social contract erects the Leviathan to keep us out of it
Leviathan is the most influential work of early modern political philosophy. Hobbes argues that natural human beings, equally vulnerable and motivated by self-preservation, in the absence of a common power, exist in a state of war of all against all. Rational self-interest dictates the creation of a sovereign — the artificial Leviathan — to whom subjects transfer their natural right to use force, in exchange for the peace such a sovereign secures. Beneath the political argument lies a thoroughgoing materialist metaphysics (Part I) and an unflinching account of language, passion, and motivation. The work has shaped every subsequent debate in political theory, from Locke and Rousseau through Carl Schmitt and contemporary social-contract theory.
Author
Editions cited
- Leviathan (Edwin Curley, Hackett, 1994 — based on 1651 head text)
- Leviathan (Noel Malcolm, Clarendon, 3 vols, 2012 — critical edition)
- Leviathan (Richard Tuck, Cambridge, revised 1996)
School Embodiments
Hobbes's materialism — only bodies exist, mental phenomena are bodily motions, even God (if real) is corporeal — is one of the cleanest early statements of philosophical naturalism in the Western tradition.
"The Universe, that is, the whole mass of all things that are, is corporeal, that is to say, body." (Leviathan IV.46)
A robust mind-independent realism about bodies, motions, and the political order. Hobbes is not a sceptic about the external world; he is a sceptic about whether human nature without political authority can produce peace.
"The Passions that incline men to Peace, are Feare of Death; Desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living." (Leviathan I.13)
Hobbes is one of the most rigorous early modern compatibilist determinists: human will is the last appetite in deliberation, fully caused by prior states; freedom is the absence of external constraint, not absence of causation.
"Liberty, and Necessity are consistent: as in the water, that hath not only liberty, but a necessity of descending by the Channel." (Leviathan II.21)
Hobbes's political reasoning is pragmatic in the precise sense: institutions are justified by what they produce (peace, security, the preservation of life), not by appeal to natural justice anterior to them.
"During the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre... and the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short." (Leviathan I.13)
Hobbes's deductive method — define terms precisely, reason rigorously from them — anticipates the analytic temper. His logical analysis of language in Part I has been read by Quine, Sellars, and others as a major precursor.
"Truth consisteth in the right ordering of names in our affirmations." (Leviathan I.4)
Books III and IV of Leviathan offer an unusually heterodox biblical theology — anti-clerical, anti-Roman, anti-spiritualist — that has been read in the genealogy of modern liberal theology and Enlightenment biblical criticism.
"The Kingdom of God is a real, not metaphorical kingdom." (Leviathan III.35)
The sovereign is an artificial person — political authority is constructed by covenant, not given by nature. Hobbes is one of the earliest constructivists about political and moral order.
"For by Art is created that great Leviathan called a Common-wealth, or State... which is but an Artificiall Man." (Leviathan, Introduction)
Mechanist tradition.
Social-contract tradition.
Internal Tensions
Hobbes's materialism and his Christianity are notoriously difficult to reconcile, and his contemporaries (Bramhall, Boyle, the Royal Society) accused him of atheism barely concealed. The political doctrine's sharpness — absolute sovereignty as the price of peace — is in tension with the concession that subjects retain the right to preserve their own lives even against the sovereign (chapter 21). Locke's Second Treatise (1689) is in part an attempt to rescue political philosophy from what Locke saw as Hobbes's authoritarian conclusion.
I. Time
Hobbes treats time as a real continuum in which bodies move and political institutions endure. Causation is deterministic — chapter 21's treatment of liberty and necessity is one of the clearest seventeenth-century compatibilist statements. Time is substantival, linear, unidirectional.
Attributes
II. Space
Substantival, infinite, three-dimensional, locally interactive. Hobbes is a thoroughgoing post-Galilean mechanist; space is the field in which bodies move and collide.
Attributes
III. Matter
The most thoroughgoing materialism of the seventeenth century. Only bodies exist; mental life consists of motions in the body; even God, on Hobbes's heterodox reading, must be a (subtle) body if real. Matter is infinite, substantival, conserved.
Attributes
IV. Observer
The Hobbesian observer is embodied, plural, active, driven by passions and reason in proportion. Knowledge is immediate (sensation) and built up through reckoning with names. Agency is active but compatibilist-deterministic. Moral authority is constructed: there is no natural justice prior to the political covenant. Metaphysical agency is None in the working sense — whatever God is doing, the political philosophy proceeds without him.
Attributes
V. Energy
Standard mechanical energetics of the seventeenth century — substantival motion, conservation of impetus, irreversible dissipation in collisions. Hobbes is in continuous dialogue with Galilean and Cartesian physics.
Attributes
VI. Information
Names and their right ordering are the substantival informational structure of human reasoning. Personal information is not conserved — Hobbes is famously reticent on personal immortality, and chapter 38 reads biblical resurrection in materialist terms: the body will be raised; there is no separable soul to preserve in the interim.
Attributes
Personas with the nearest attribute fingerprint
Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.
Computed school proximity
The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.
How Leviathan resolves each dilemma
51 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 9 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 6 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.
4 mainstream positions
Matter · 7 dilemmas, all mainstream
Observer · 37 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Mind, agency, and the knower's relation to the known.