Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish and Short

Hobbes published Leviathan in 1651. England was in the middle of a civil war, the king had been executed two years earlier, and the question of who had the right to command anybody was not academic.

His method was to strip everything away and ask what life would be with no authority at all.

The answer is the most quoted sentence in political philosophy. In that condition there is no industry, no agriculture, no navigation, no building, no arts, no letters, no society, and worst of all continual fear and danger of violent death. And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Two things about this are usually missed.

The first is that it is not history. Hobbes is not claiming there was a period when people lived like this. He is running a thought experiment, and the question it answers is: what would authority have to be worth in order to be worth what it costs? You find that out by imagining its absence, and the absence has to be genuinely terrible for the conclusion he wants to follow.

The second is that his state of nature is not a claim that people are wicked. It is a claim about a situation. Take reasonable people, remove any common power, and give them scarce resources and the capacity to kill each other in their sleep, and pre-emptive violence becomes rational even for somebody who would prefer peace. The problem is structural rather than moral, which is why it cannot be solved by everyone deciding to be nicer.

From there the argument is short. Rational people in that condition would agree to hand their power to a sovereign, and to obey. What they get is security. What they give up is nearly everything else.

Hobbes is admirably clear that this is what is on offer. There is no promise of prosperity, no representation, no guarantee of fair treatment. You are trading liberty for not being killed, and his case is simply that the alternative is worse.

And the sovereign cannot be overruled.

This is the part modern readers reject instinctively, and it follows from the premises rather than from any enthusiasm for power. A sovereign who can be overruled is not a way out of the conflict; it is one more party to it, and you are back where you started with an extra claimant. If the problem is the absence of a final authority, then a final authority is what solves it, and a final authority that can be appealed against is not final.

Now the reason this book matters even to everyone who thinks it is wrong.

Hobbes derives an almost unlimited state from premises about fear alone. No divine right. No natural hierarchy of better and worse men. No appeal to scripture as the source of the sovereign's title. Just individuals, their situation, and what it would be rational for them to agree to.

That is the first recognisably modern political argument, and it created the ground everybody afterwards stands on. Locke, Rousseau, Rawls and Nozick all argue about what rational individuals would agree to, and they are arguing on Hobbes's terms even when they are arguing against his conclusion.

He built the floor. The rest of this book is a series of attempts to put something better on it.