Leviathan

An extension of his state of nature theory, Hobbes’s theory of social contracts—or covenants, as he calls them—has had an enormous impact on Western thought. To Hobbes, the making and keeping of covenants is as much a part of natural law as the right for self-preservation. Once again, it is instructive to compare Hobbes’s theories to the philosophers who followed in his wake. For example, Hobbes seems to anticipate Rousseau’s argument a century in advance that humans are naturally social creatures and therefore are unlikely to fall into the state of barbarism Hobbes imagines in nature. In comparing humankind to insects, Hobbes writes, “These creatures, having not, as man, the use of reason, do not see, nor think they see, any fault in the administration of their common business: men, however, think themselves wiser than others, causing civil war” (108).

To that, Rousseau might argue that by the time humans began to thrive in great enough numbers to compete with one another over resources, they would have already amassed into family units and clans, preventing the condition of all-out war Hobbes imagines. This isn’t to say that Locke and Rousseau do not believe humankind does not benefit from covenants or contracts with sovereign authorities. All three believe that sovereigns receive their authority from the implicit or explicit consent of the governed and not from God, as the then-prevalent divine right of kings doctrine stipulated. Rather, the biggest place of disagreement between Hobbes and his successors pertains to how these covenants are made and the conditions under which they may be broken.

In Leviathan there is some lack of clarity as to precisely when each subject is said to consent to a sovereign’s rule. Hobbes’s argument that subjects of any kingdom have already provided tacit consent to be governed relies solely on his vision of the state of nature as being barbaric and unproductive toward each individual’s self-preservation, a precept to which Locke and Rousseau object. After all, monarchs are rarely elected by popular vote. And while it is reasonable to expect, say, a citizen of the United States to obey the president even if that person cast a vote for somebody else, in that case the individual gives consent by participating in the democratic process and pledging to accept its results.

This issue of consent is complicated even further in the cases of sovereignty by acquisition, in which a vanquished sovereign loses power over his or her dominion and subjects by surrendering them to a foreign invader. Hobbes would argue that by consenting to the rule of their previous sovereign, they must own all of that individual’s actions, including the act of surrender and consequent transfer of power to the new sovereign. This, however, would seem to contradict Hobbes’s precept that a covenant between sovereign and subject is broken when that sovereign can no longer protect the people from invasion. Under Hobbes’s own logic, then, how is the transfer of consent from the vanquished sovereign to the victorious one supposed to be assumed; especially if those subjects refuse to live peaceably under the new sovereign because they do not share the same values or religion? On that note, is the state of civil war Hobbes so fears that much worse than the reality of separate sovereign dominions in a state of near-constant war with one another, which were the conditions Europe found itself in for much of the past thousand years?

From these contradictions and concerns, one might reasonably look to the social contract theorists who followed in Hobbes’s wake, like Locke and Rousseau. For Locke, the social contract rests not on an effort to prevent a natural state of total war but on the notion of private property. The moment humans decide to leave the state of nature by laying claim to possessions, parcels of land, and even their own bodies, a civil government is needed to protect these rights. According to Locke, when families and clans organize into civil societies, they submit themselves not to a single monarch to whom they owe eternal obedience but to the will of the majority, which is mutable. Thus, there are numerous conditions under which citizens may justly rebel against sovereign power, at least under Locke’s view of government. Indeed, Locke’s work was extraordinarily influential on Thomas Jefferson and other participants in the American Revolution. Moreover, Locke’s less grim view of the state of nature allows him to envision conditions under which the populace rejects civil government outright, opting instead to return to natural living.

Like Locke, much of Rousseau’s social contract theory rests on the introduction of private property, which he terms a fall from grace out of a simpler, more idyllic state of nature. Without a civil government to pass laws tending toward better equity, humankind persists in a state of extreme inequality, as those who do not own much property or any at all are necessarily subservient to those who do. This is the fundamental problem Rousseau seeks to address with his 1762 work The Social Contract. Contrary to Hobbes, Rousseau believes that the fundamental contract on which a civil society is built is not the covenant between subject and sovereign but the covenant among all individuals to live peaceably. Which isn’t to say there is no covenant between democratically elected rulers and citizens, only that the terms of this covenant demand that the ruler work toward the good of the people or else the people may justly rebel. This is a clear contradiction of Hobbes’s theory that the sovereign, once elevated at the people’s consent, is essentially incapable of any action that would justify rebellion.

It’s worth pointing out that Rousseau’s idea of democracy differs from Hobbes’s in that Hobbes is content to place sovereignty in the hands of a group that is representative of the whole but not the whole itself. Rousseau, on the other hand, argues that each individual citizen has a right to participate in the decision-making process. As such, a Rousseauian democracy may only be viable in relatively small geographic areas where the citizens, within reason, know and understand one another. It would therefore be of great interest to know if Rousseau would rightly consider the modern United States properly democratic under his terms. Moreover, Rousseau’s guidance that the most effective democracies are organized by small groups of people is complicated by the difficulties these communities would necessarily face in protecting themselves from foreign invaders, which is arguably the most crucial duty of a sovereign, at least in Hobbes’s telling. So it is that all three of these theories are exactly that: theoretical. And given that each of them has flaws and virtues, it’s instructive to examine Hobbes’s theories of states of nature and social contracts as part of a dialogue with those who followed in his wake.

The differences between Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau are perhaps best illustrated by the book’s dominant symbol: the leviathan. Aside from the title, it is in these chapters that Hobbes first mentions the monster by name. In the Book of Job, God frames the sea creature as a menace so fearsome that no individual who encounters it can expect to survive. While this may seem like an odd symbol for Hobbes to use to describe a sovereign to whom we give consent to rule, it highlights the extent to which rulers must rely on fear to induce obedience. This runs counter to Lockeian and Rousseauian formulations of the social contract, in which the ruler has as much if not more to fear from the people, as opposed to the other way around.