Leviathan

Hobbes published Leviathan in 1651, in the wake of the English Civil War, and the book reads like it. It is a work of political philosophy built on a materialist psychology, and its central argument is that without an absolute sovereign, human life collapses into violence.

The first two parts do the foundational work. Part I ("Of Man") begins with sensation, imagination, and the passions, constructing a mechanical account of human nature from the ground up. Desire and aversion drive all action. Reason is calculation, language is conventional, and there is no summum bonum, no highest good that orders human striving. What there is, universally, is fear of violent death. Part II ("Of Commonwealth") builds the political theory on this psychology. In the state of nature, where no common power exists, every person has a right to everything, and the result is the war of all against all. Life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." To escape this condition, individuals covenant with one another to transfer their rights to a sovereign, who holds absolute authority. The sovereign is not party to the contract and cannot be deposed.

Parts III and IV ("Of a Christian Commonwealth" and "Of the Kingdom of Darkness") apply this framework to ecclesiastical power. Hobbes subordinates the church to the civil sovereign, dismantling the claims of both papal authority and independent clergy. The theological chapters are not an appendix; they address the practical question that had torn England apart: who decides matters of religion?

The Leviathan provoked outrage from royalists and republicans alike, from churchmen and materialists. It remains the sharpest statement of the problem that drives modern political thought: how do beings with no natural order among them construct one that holds?