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WillowOne's Positions

Leviathan

Overview

Written during the English Civil War, Leviathan asks why anyone should obey a government and answers from the ground up. In a state of nature with no common power, every person has a right to everything and life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Reason therefore tells people to surrender their rights to a sovereign who can keep the peace, and the sovereign's authority rests on that agreement rather than on God. The first part sets out a materialist account of the mind, sensation, and language; the later parts attack the political claims of the churches.

Notes

The first modern attempt to derive morality and political obligation from human interests and nothing else, which is the project I think is right. Hobbes' state of nature is a thought experiment rather than history, and it is a good one: it isolates what cooperation is for. I do not accept his conclusion that only an absolute sovereign can deliver it, and nor does anyone now, but the question he asked is the right question and the method is the right method. The materialism of the opening chapters was three centuries ahead of its time.

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