ABSTRACT
In the last couple of chapters we have puzzled over Leviathan’s state of nature.
In Chapter Five, we asked how the nastiness of the state of nature furthers Hobbes’s aim
of justifying political authority, given that people have good reason to prefer that
authority to the state of nature. I argued that it is hard to make sense of the justification as
a story about how people come to leave the state of nature and set up political authority
Rather, the state of nature proves to be unleavable, at least by rational decision. It is not
that we actually were in the state of nature, and agreed to leave it, because there is no
rational pathway from it to political authority. In the absence of such a pathway we
cannot think of ourselves as leaving it even hypothetically
At the same time, Hobbes does not think that political authority is justified simply
because there is some common power which dominates everyone else. Rather authority
requires agreement: it is not that someone who is “vanquished” in battle is “obliged
because he is conquered, that is to say beaten and taken, or put to flight; but because he
comes in and submits to the victor” (L p141).
