ABSTRACT
Thomas Hobbes (De Cive, 1642, Leviathan, 1651) wrote in the troubled times of the Civil War and the Commonwealth, when the need of a strong central government was more felt in England than the need of domestic reform or international mediation. He is the greatest modern apostle of the doctrine that Might is Right. He speaks like Grotius of a law of nature, and a state of nature, but conceives them very dierently, and his writings may be read throughout as if controversial pamphlets against Grotius. What in the Dutch philosopher was only implied,—that the individual is the starting point of political philosophy,—is by the English made explicit and emphatic. In tracing State and Society to their rst beginnings, we come (if we follow Hobbes) to individual men, by nature not social, but, “ad mutuam cœdem apti,” selsh and anti-social, in a state of war with each other.1 In this state of nature there are no laws, not even laws of nature. Every man is, roughly speaking, his fellow’s equal in the balance of physical and intellectual gifts; every one has a claim to all things; his desires are boundless, and his will is only bounded by his power. It is the struggle for existence, with supremacy to the strongest, described in the 2nd book of Plato’s Republic; and it is a struggle which ceases only when the combatants recognise that they are defeating their own ends by continuing it. The rst law of nature is self-preservation, and that law bids them seek peace instead of war. They discover that the paths of gain and glory lead but to the grave. The voice of reason is rst heard when passion nds out its own impotence. But to get peace they must make mutual concessions; each must give up his unlimited claims, on condition that the others do the same. Obeying the law of nature, they give up the state of nature, and found a political union, where the once independent individuals have sur rendered their several wills to one sovereign authority. They do this by entering into a Contract, a contract on which all other contracts depend. The Sovereign may be a single man or may be a group, but in any case, represents their common self-denying ordinance, their common submission for Peace’s sake. They then become one people instead of an aggregate of separate atoms.2 To Hobbes, therefore (as to Grotius), the State is “an articial body.” “By art is created that great Leviathan called a Commonwealth or State, which is but an articial man (though of greater stature and length than the natural man,
for whose protection it was intended), and in which the sovereignty is an articial soul giving life and motion to the whole body.”3
