Leviathan is an odd book; even odder than you would judge by looking at its cover. The cover displays a gigantic and rather dashing 17th century king looming over a well-ordered and prosperous landscape, his flesh and clothing made up of hundreds of tiny people. And the book is very strange indeed. It is also influential – or, at least, frequently referenced. Its author, Thomas Hobbes, is remembered only as the author of Leviathan, but “Hobbesian” remains a recognisable descriptor. There aren’t many thinkers who have become an adjectival shorthand for an idea, and of those that have, most refer to something only tangentially connected to their work. Life as a war of all against all that is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” unless people band together to create states that have absolute power over them; if you’re saying something is Hobbesian then you’re referring to something that is at least closely connected to his central ideas. And people do so relatively often – the cartoon tiger makes it tricky to compare his search rankings to those of other philosophers and political theorists (as does the existence of co-ordinates, asexual love, buildings used for grinding, and thinly sliced cured pork) but wherever it comes in the league table, Leviathan is one of the big beasts. It’s at least worth considering that it might be important or interesting to read.
It’s helpful, then, that it’s well written. Not easy to read, after over 350 years, and maybe it never was; the analogy of the state to an artificial man composed of its people is made at the start of the introduction, so there’s a slight suspicion that even the cover artist didn’t make it past the first page. It’s long – and only about a third of it is about the thing it’s supposed to be about. It does sometimes go on a bit; it is unlikely that you are as interested in biblical interpretation as this book assumes you must be. But Hobbes puts things memorably, and often beautifully. He had the advantage of writing at the tail end of the Shakespeare and King James Bible period, when it seems to have been easier to write in a way that now come across as profound; but this was an advantage shared by other philosophers of a similar vintage, and men like Bacon or Locke never saw a sentence that couldn’t be improved by trying to make it read as if it’s been poorly translated from Latin. Leviathan is not confusing, deliberately obscure, or written to show how clever Hobbes was. He is trying to communicate interesting ideas as clearly as possible.
One reason these ideas might be worth thinking about is that it was written at a time and place when the world we live in was being created. Path dependence alone means that engaging with the intellectual culture of that time is worthwhile. The Industrial Revolution was getting underway, people were experimenting with the forms of government that much of the world eventually moved to living under, friends and correspondents of Hobbes (and to an extent Hobbes himself) were laying the foundations for modern science. The national sovereignty that he effectively supports, and which was at the time he wrote of relatively limited importance, has swept across the globe, devouring everything in its path. If you’re interested in how things work now, and how they can work better in the future, then reading one of the most influential books written at that crucial time seems like a good idea.
Once you get started, you quickly notice something which seems at odds with its reputation: the intellectual optimism. Optimism about what can be achieved, optimism about overthrowing everything that had previously been thought just by thinking about it more carefully, optimism about how superior the present is to everything else that has come before it. He is entertainingly dismissive of previous thinkers (Aristotle’s writing is in turns absurd, harmful, and ignorant, and Greek philosophy in general “was rather a dream than science, and set forth in senseless and insignificant language”), but with few exceptions this is not a book that engages in point by point refutation of the ideas of others. He doesn’t have time; he has more than enough to do just setting out what he thinks himself. He’s what Yudkowsky might be if he tried to believe in himself a bit more. Taleb, but without the nagging self-doubt. Others stand on the shoulders of giants; Hobbes kicks aside the bones of Lilliputians. He starts from first principles, and is confident that he can set out how everything works, and how everything ought to work. He was in at the dawn of a new age, and he knew it. He has an endearing sincerity, curiosity, and willingness to follow that curiosity wherever it leads, no matter who that might offend. That doesn’t mean that he was unaware of the potential consequences he might face; and without minimising the unpleasantness of the modern day equivalents, Hobbes could reasonably point out that, on the whole, they don’t seem that bad when compared to the risk he faced of being tortured and executed. He felt compelled to share Leviathan, and accepted (though also shrewdly tried to minimise) the risks involved in doing so.
So, what is it that he felt compelled to share with the world? What is it about? Everything, really. How reality works, how the human body and mind work, what thought is and does, how human organisations work and should work, what God is and how Christianity and religion work. He was around at a time when new worlds were being discovered, when “time and industry produce every day new knowledge”, and he has a contagious delight in the vistas he saw opening up in front of him. He starts with artificial life; the artificial life of machines, and of the state. He passes through the senses, thought, optics, and the nature of external reality, to the laws of motion, matter, and gravity - with a brief discursion into witchcraft, to remind you that he was writing in the 1600s (he doesn’t believe in it, but he thinks that if the witches do, then punishing them is reasonable). He deals rapidly and with absolute certainty with meaning, reason, emotion, desire, and the intellectual virtues and vices. The organisation of all knowledge is dealt with in chapter 9; chapter 9 consists of three paragraphs and a diagram. It’s exhilarating. Then he gets onto power, and the concepts that surround it, and he starts to slow down a bit. For Hobbes, power is competence; the ability to do things. And the thing that people care about above all else, the principal reason why they want power, is so that they can obtain security. He memorably asserts as “a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.” But the primary drive behind the seeking of power isn’t conquest; it’s safety.
In fact, Hobbes’s idea of power is far more bloodless than you would expect. Philosophers and political theorists who reject traditional ideas of objective morality tend to have a bad reputation. Machiavelli, Nietszche, Schmitt; an unhealthy fascination with evil, and an obsessive interest in domination, remain associated with all of them (you can argue whether this is entirely fair to either of the first two, though the whole unrepentant Nazi thing does put a thumb on the scales for Carl). Even Thucydides, tediously precise as he can be (you might imagine it would be dull to find out how the Athenians worked out the correct length for their siege ladders at Plataea; you will still find it startling quite how boring the answer is) gave the Spartans rather more than a fair hearing. And distrust of such thinkers is of course sensible. Whenever someone starts talking about how sometimes doing bad things might be okay, or how, when you really think about it, maybe our ideas about right and wrong are just a set of bourgeois prejudices, you should think carefully before agreeing to dine with them at remote restaurants where the speciality of the house is a succulent meat of mysterious origin.
This suspicion lingered around Leviathan, and Hobbes, for some time after its publication. But Leviathan’s sulfurous reek dissipated a long time ago, and however dangerous its conclusions may be felt to be, there’s nothing in the book to suggest that Hobbes is trying to justify any unsettling personal predelictions. He sees that it is the case that, in certain times and places, "potent men breaking through the cobweb laws of their country, the weaker sort, and those that have failed in their enterprises, have been esteemed the only criminals"; but believes that it is an error to reason from this that there is no such thing as justice. He is sceptical about the effectiveness of nefarious plotting: “those that deceive upon hope of not being observed, do commonly deceive themselves, the darkness in which they believe they lie hidden being nothing but their own blindness; and are no wiser than children, that think all hid, by hiding their own eyes". Most of the time, he writes as if he doesn’t think that he will be the one in charge of the state he’s proposing; every now and then he’ll essay a suggestion as to how society should be ordered, but these sallies are followed by him reminding us that it doesn’t really matter what his preferences are. The suggestions he does have are generally rather attractive. He sets out the leading virtues as equity, justice, and gratitude. He is a believer in equality and liberty: "in whatsoever is not regulated by the commonwealth, tis equity (which is the law of nature, and therefore an eternal law of God) that every man equally enjoy his liberty". He proposes that judges should be chosen based on their understanding of justice, which is likely to be best developed in those "that have had the most leisure, and had the most inclination to meditate thereon"; the vision of a judiciary made up of those who have retreated from the world to ponder the nature of fairness is an agreeable one. Leviathan should provide welfare: "whereas many men, by accident inevitable, become unable to maintain themselves by their labour, they ought not to be left to the charity of private persons, but to be provided for (as far forth as the necessities of nature require) by the laws of the Commonwealth". The state he imagines would allow its citizens "the liberty to buy, and sell, and otherwise connect with each other; to choose their own abode, their own diet, their own trade of life, and institute their children as they themselves think fit". You can’t really describe him as being progressive on gender issues, and he hardly seems to think about women at all, but he does at least accept that men are not invariably “the most excellent sex”; "there is not always that differentiation of strength or prudence between the man and the woman" that would mean that men should self-evidently have power over their wives. It is unfortunate then that, ultimately, he doesn’t think that his views about the form a state should take are that important.
We should really get onto why that is the case. After all, we’re a fair way through the review and I’ve barely mentioned the thing which everyone thinks the book is supposed to be about (although this is largely because the book itself takes so long to get round to it). When people say that something is Hobbesian, are they right? Did he think that we need an all-powerful state, a Leviathan, to prevent us from descending into chaos? Yes, he’s absolutely clear about that. He covers a lot of ground, and isn’t in general repetitive; but he returns to this point again and again. He goes further, and says that no one had ever proposed that the power of the state should be as unchallenged as he does. Other ills are irrelevant compared to "the miseries, and horrible calamities, that accompany a civil war". And a country without a central authority is at risk of disintegrating into civil war "just as the members of the natural body dissolve into earth, for want of a soul to hold them together". This state must necessarily be coercive, as its citizens will not always agree with its decisions. Justice must depend on violence and the credible threat of violence. "It is men and arms, not words and promises, that make the force and power of the laws".
So his Leviathan is able to enforce its decisions, and it has a monopoly of authority. But given that it has to have those qualities, you can’t really say much else about what it should look like. Leviathan is not all-powerful in the sense that it is necessarily (or even preferably) able to exert much control over the day to day lives of its citizens, or particularly savage in the punishments it inflicts on them for failing to follow its commands. If one country has a state that commands the unchallenged loyalty of its citizens while also sentencing murderers to a brief online course of self-actualisation and chakra-realighment, that’s fine; if the country next door has a similarly effective state while sentencing those with unapproved haircuts to being publicly hanged, that’s fine too. Hobbes is a monarchist, but the ideal state can be a democracy or oligarchy, depending on local conditions: “the prosperity of a people ruled by an aristocratic, or democratic, assembly, cometh not from aristocracy, nor from democracy, but from the obedience and concord of the subjects: the people flourish in a monarchy not because one man has the right to rule them, but because they obey him.” He’s opposed to copying the form which government has taken in other countries, or at other times; doing so takes the focus away from the fact that the state must be able to command the obedience of the people it actually governs, not the people it might want them to be. He never uses the word nationalism, but his ideal states are in reality sovereign nations, free from the influence of alternative sources of power, whether religious, international, or internal. He is utterly opposed to constitutions, or any attempt at a separation of powers; anything which undermines the absolute power of the state risks conflict, while inevitably failing to achieve its objective of avoiding tyranny, as tyranny is just a word we use to describe authority we don’t like. States are and must be tyrannical. Clever schemes that divide up power will fail to achieve their aim, while risking the anarchy that will destroy everything. The authority of the state must be unchallenged. To this end, he is a supporter of freedom of thought, but emphatically opposed to freedom of speech: "a private man has always the liberty (because thought is free) to believe or not believe in his heart... but when it comes to confession of that faith, the private reason must submit to the public". Everyone must commit, in word and deed, to wholeheartedly supporting their local Leviathan. Fascists must support multiculturalism, and communists must support hereditary aristocracy, if the state decrees that they should do so. We can fondly imagine ourselves as part of the resistance in 1930s Germany, or Russia; Hobbes believes not just that we would have collaborated, but that we would have been right to do so. You must do anything necessary to support the state in maintaining the obedience of its people, whether or not you like the consequences. Ethnic cleansing? Genocide? Are there no limits?
The only potential limit he admits to is your duty to God. This is an issue dealt with at length in the second half of Leviathan. It should by now be evident that I am passionately fond of this book; but even I would have to admit that the second half is less essential than the first. That is not to say it is uninteresting - although there is quite a lot of detailed biblical exegesis, and rather more in the way of fiery denunciations of the papacy than might be felt to be strictly necessary. But it is no longer relevant. Hobbes devotes so much space to the bible as it is the religious text prescribed by his state. He is explicit that he is only considering the version of it which the state has approved. God exists, and theoretically that means that there is a morality beyond that of the state; but in practice you should conform to the version of God that your state tells you to believe in. Your religion could change at any moment and, no matter what your private views on the matter, in public you should embrace the new dogma with as much enthusiasm as the old.
So God does not give us a get-out clause. Hobbes is optimistic (you could argue over-optimistic) about rulers being rational, which leads to them having the best interests of their citizens at heart. But if they don’t, then there is no moral justification for opposing them. There is no solid logical ground on which you can build a foundation for personal morality, and attempts to do so are doomed to failure. We all know what is more important than anything else; security from murder, violence, and pillage. The state is the only means of providing this, and so we must obey the state. You might think that this conclusion would lead him to spend time glorying in the strength of the state he is proposing.
In fact, rather than being in awe of Leviathan’s power, he is anxious about its weakness, and he thinks it needs rational people to prop it up. Leviathan often fails. It has no long-term future; it "is mortal, and subject to decay, as all other earthly creatures are". It survives as long as it works, and should be destroyed completely and permanently as soon as it outlives its usefulness. Unsurprisingly, this fragile giant was not popular with either monarchists or parliamentarians in his own time; it’s hard to see how it could be viewed positively by the supporters of any actually existing Leviathan at any time. Every state claims a form of legitimacy beyond the immediate reality of its power, and Hobbes is at pains to point out that they are all wrong. He’s not a stupid man, and given both his opposition to freedom of speech, and his frequently asserted devotion to doing what the state wants, an appropriate subtitle for the book could be “Do Not Write This Book; If You Do Find You Have Accidentally Written It, Do Not Under Any Circumstances Publish It; And If Someone Else Publishes It, For The Love Of God, Please Do Not Read It”. He addresses this flaw; he explains that it was written at a time of civil war, where the country’s leaders were still deciding what the state should look like, and he was only publishing “such doctrines as I think true, and that manifestly tend to peace and loyalty, to the consideration of those that are yet in deliberation”. This is less than convincing. The reality is that he preaches obedience while being constitutionally incapable of remaining obedient himself. The explicit instructions he sets out in the book would be undermined, were it to be widely read, by the way it is written, its contents, the enquiring and sceptical caste of mind that pervades it, and its very existence.
In practice, this was never likely to be a significant issue. He is writing for a very limited audience of people like himself – intelligent, literate, curious. He discusses the ways in which people are manipulated by lies; but only in order to attack organisations that use falsehoods as methods of control. He seems to have difficulty in really believing that people can be irrational, or unable to think things through – people’s “actions are derived from the opinion they have of the good, or evil, which from those actions redound unto themselves”. There’s a sense that he’s not just describing how things should work, but trying to will a more rational populace into existence that would enable things to work that way – citizens for whom Leviathan, whatever its form, and whatever its impositions, would in practice tend to be superior to the alternatives. Its authority is absolute; but it is also limited in time and space. It is subject to reason, to be discarded and replaced when reason tells you that it is no longer capable of fulfilling its function. And it prevents other, more deep rooted and intellectually damaging institutions from gaining a foothold. Religions, universities, societies (secret or otherwise), alternative social organisations of all kinds – Leviathan can protect us from their malign influence. In order for it to do so, though, a sufficient number of us have to start to see the world in a new way.
Is it worth doing so? Should you change your mind about how things work, and how they should work, as a result of reading Leviathan? Spending time reading and re-reading a single book is dangerous; you can start to see it as the key to all understanding, whether it’s Leviathan or Winnie the Pooh. So treat what follows with scepticism. But I have found that the more I read Hobbes, the easier it becomes to focus on the practical ability of different people and organisations to actually do things. It’s remarkable how often you notice people, even (or perhaps especially) those who think of themselves as hard-headed realists, making arguments that are divorced from reality. In general, there are a lot of things we think of as being central to our civilisation which Leviathan suggests are in fact irrelevant, and whose survival is a by-product of the prosperity created by our revolutionary cultural package as a whole. Everyone is attached to something. To one particular religion, civilisation, or nation state; to democracy, or autocracy; to freedom of speech, or the primacy of one particular text above all others; to ethnic unity for some, and ethnic diversity for others; to any idea which we would like to see lasting, and that is bigger than ourselves. Hobbes is surely correct in stating that none of these things matter as much as we think they do, cossetted as we are from the underlying reality of the world that he was unfortunate enough to have to witness. If there is a crisis in the near future, and we have to get rid of these attachments, it might be better if we are prepared to do so as soon as it becomes expedient, rather than taking the risk of destroying what really matters along with what matters less than we think.
As well as challenging specific beliefs, Leviathan is challenging in a more general way. Most works of philosophy or life advice, as well as their explicit message, are implicitly telling you that you should use the book to help you decide on your own personal morality and goals, and that after having done so you should both try to persuade others to share them, and ensure that they guide your future actions. It is just possible that this is self-indulgent and foolish, and you should work things out for yourself, and then shut up and copy what everyone else is doing.
Attempting to apply this with the rigour that Hobbes would insist on, I find that I’m not able to follow him all the way in supporting absolute obedience to the instructions of an external authority, no matter how unpleasant you may think them to be. There are any number of thought experiments where the Leviathan approach gives answers I can’t stomach. But it does seem like it might have worked. Human suffering has vastly decreased since the time of Hobbes, and I don’t think you could argue that there’s been a moral, philosophical or religious revolution to account for it. Hobbes thought increased security through obedience to a local and absolute authority would provide the necessary structure and incentives for progress to transform things for the better; and that deep thinking about what was morally right or wrong was at best a waste of time (as it is obvious what we all want to avoid happening), and at worst actively harmful (as it leads to losing sight of what matters most – the bedrock of increased security). The march of progress, the dissolution of organised religion, and the existence of all-powerful local rulers are inextricably linked. As the centuries have passed, more and more Leviathans have started to roam the earth, and it may not be a coincidence that this has been correlated, overall and with significant variation, with things getting so much better. I can’t in all honesty say that I went into reading Leviathan with a huge degree of faith in universalist ideas, international organisations, and moral certainties – but I’m now less convinced of their worth than I used to be. I did go into it as a fairly absolutist supporter of free speech, and while I still find it congenial, I’m more doubtful as to how good an idea it is. I’m also more open to the idea that globalisation in general, and the internet in particular, is a Bad Thing; perhaps we should be letting a thousand great firewalls bloom.
Even if Leviathan doesn’t persuade you to modify any of your views, there’s still a lot to be gained from reading it. It’s filled with great writing and stimulating ideas, most of which I’ve barely touched on. Above all there’s the spirit that animates the book, the spirit of confidence, pragmatism, openness, curiosity, intellectual optimism, unsparing clear-sightedness, and unceasing enquiry; it’s easy to see why it conquered the world. If you’re as confident in its power as Hobbes was, you might feel that it is less fragile than we tend to think; and that it’s your local oppressive state that needs your support, rather than the seemingly delicate network of ideas that appears more directly responsible for human progress, and which it would be much more inspiring to be called on to defend.
And even if you don’t care about the contents of the book at all, but are convinced of Leviathan’s enduring prestige and influence, what should you do to emulate it, if like Hobbes you believe that you and people like you are creating a new world, that everyone should think more like you do, and that everyone should focus on the things that you think are important? Write something long, that includes everything that you think matters, and don’t worry too much about including a few lengthy discursions. Write clearly, engagingly, and well. Mention your disdain for the ideas of others, but don’t spend too much time attacking them. Have important and true things to say, which contradict established wisdom. Communicate absolute confidence in the superiority of your arguments. Succeed in irritating or angering almost everyone. Think up at least two phrases that are memorable and novel enough that they will be used for centuries to come. And make sure you have a great picture on the cover.