Summary: Chapters 17–31
The first law of nature demands that humans seek peace,
an end best met by the establishment of contracts. Yet the natural
inclinations of men toward power always impel them to break contracts.
Without the fear of punishment for breaking contracts, men will
break them whenever it is immediately advantageous for them to do
so. Thus the basic social contract of the commonwealth must vest
power in one central, sovereign authority, with power to punish
those who break the contract. Under the rule of the sovereign, men
are impelled, by fear, to keep the commonwealth functioning smoothly.
If the state is imagined as a person, the soul of that
person is the concept of sovereignty, and sovereign himself is the
person’s head. Hobbes names this artificial person, representing
the state in its totality, the Leviathan. Desiring to escape the
state of the nature through contract, all persons erect a common
power at the head of their commonwealth, whether one man or an assembly,
and agree to submit to its will to escape fear of each other. The
sovereign is charged with doing whatever necessary to defend the
commonwealth. As all individual rights are transferred to him, all
are compelled to follow the sovereign’s commands regarding defense. Although
Hobbes here states that the sovereign may be either an individual
or an assembly, he does not yet state his preference for the sole
sovereign ruler.
Commonwealths can be formed in two ways: through institution,
or agreement; and through acquisition, or force.
Although the group of people taken by force under a sovereign’s
rule may resist the acquisition and depose the sovereign before
he takes control, if they do not do so initially, the sovereign
in both acquisition and institution holds the same right of dominion
over his subjects and the same responsibilities regarding the common
defense. The sovereign is the foundation of all true knowledge and
the embodied power underlying all civil peace. There are three possible
forms of sovereign authority created by contract: monarchy, aristocracy,
and democracy. Of these, Hobbes proclaims that monarchy is the best because
it offers the greatest consistency and lowest potential for conflict,
limiting the decision-making body to one.
Liberty may be defined as the ability
to act according to one’s own individual will without being physically
hindered from acting as one wishes. From a strictly materialist
perspective, only chains or imprisonment can prevent one from acting
as such. Thus, under the rule of the sovereign, free subjects, unencumbered
by chains, maintain their liberty. Although there may be certain
laws and “artificial chains” arising from law under the sovereign,
subjects have no right to complain about such chains because they
have entered into a contract with the sovereign. Furthermore, since
fear dominates the state of nature and hinders a person’s ability
to act as he wishes, true liberty does not exist in the state of
nature. Only when the subject has forsworn his own fear and power
to the sovereign to be used as tools is he absolutely free. If the
sovereign ever loses his authority or ability to protect the commonwealth,
then the soul will have gone out of the Leviathan, and subjects
will be released from their contract and returned to the fear-filled
state of nature—necessitating that they form a new contract if they
don’t wish to endure its horrors.
Hobbes identifies all the subunits of society as systems
within that body: towns, trade organizations, and households that
can be established by the sovereign or by groups of individual persons joined
by some common interest. Political systems are
always established by the sovereign, while systems created by independent
subjects are termed private systems. Those ministers
appointed by the sovereign to administer his systems are understood
to be representatives of the sovereign’s will. These “public ministers”
act as joints in the Leviathanic body, manipulating the movements
of all its limbs. Further expanding the bodily metaphor, Hobbes
states that all goods produced within the commonwealth or obtained
by trade are the “nutrition” on which the Leviathan’s body subsists.
Meanwhile, money, the liquidated form of commodities, is the blood
of the body, circulating through all its various members to keep
it functional. Last, the self- reproduction of the Leviathan is
achieved by bearing versions of itself in miniature, offspring we
know as plantations or colonies.
Through the last part of book 2, Hobbes elaborates on
the specific functionalities of the Leviathan, particularly in relation
to the creation and administration of laws. He also points out “birth defects”
by which the Leviathan may be a dysfunctional body. The possible
scenarios by which the Leviathan may be doomed and unhealthy include
the sovereign lacking absolute power, subjects maintaining faith
in the supernatural rather than submitting to the learned doctrine
of the sovereign, matters of good and evil being decided by individuals
rather than civil law, and civil and religious authority being divided
and under different powers and imitating the governments of the
Greeks and Romans. All of these problems have the potential to poison
its body and dissolve the commonwealth into civil war. A healthy
and stable commonwealth depends on absolute respect and abeyance
of the one sovereign’s will.
