Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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47 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Levelling the play field...., 23 April 2005
Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679) was born in England, a country that endured great political turmoil during his life. Having lived through that, Hobbes' main aim was to inquire into the basis of order. The question he asked himself was "What kind of political authority will prevent the return of chaos?". And the answer to that question is in this book, "Leviathan" (1651). The Levianthan is the personification of total power, an authority without limits, created by men who realise that absolute power given to a powerfull ruler (or to an assembly) is their only way out of the dangers of the state of nature. The name that the author chose for his monarch is quite telling: the Leviathan is a sea monster that appears in the Bible and symbolizes power. This kind of monarch seems like an extreme solution for the problem of anarchy, but it is the only one that Hobbes found. Without the Leviathan, life is 'solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.' Of course, this book includes many more things than those I have already mentioned. For instance, it explains quite well Hobbes opinion regarding human nature (man is naturally a wolf to men), the state of nature (perpetual war of all against all), the origin of political institutions and the relationship between reason and force (pacts without swords are merely words), among other things. On the whole, I think this book is a classic of Political Philosophy, and I recommend it as such. Despite that, I think a word of caution is in order, so you will be prepared for what you will find when you tackle "Leviathan". Truth to be told, sometimes Hobbes' prose is too dry, and in some chapters you will need to plod through some rather arid pages. Moreover, this book isn't written in modern English, what makes it more difficult to understand. Those are the reasons why I give this book four stars instead of five... Notwithstanding that, I believe that "Leviathan" is well-worth the effort of reading it, simply because it has some interesting concepts that you should be aware of, even if you don't agree with them. The only way to discuss in a level play field with someone who has totally different ideas is to understand his arguments thoroughly, even if his position seems thoroughly strange to you. I invite you to do that with Hobbes, reading "Leviathan". Belen Alcat
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22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A classic of its kind., 6 May 2007
Why is this book important?
Hobbes stands at the end of the intellectual life of the Middle Ages which means that for centuries philosophy, religion and science had been one unified structure under the stewardship of the Church, in a World that stood at the centre of the universe beneath a God in his heaven,who provided and blessed kings and governments.
Suddenly, all these ideas and structures and certainties were in question, or blown apart with gunpowder: Hobbes wrote this during the English Civil War which resulted in the execution of a king by his people, something that would have been unthinkable beforehand.
Hobbes is a modern man, a pioneer, in the sense that he is trying to find what are the bases of knowlege and truth, and power and statecraft-and religion, and-ultimately-what it is to be human, and what sort of institutions would best represent human beings. This book is supposed to be about everything, in one volume! Which shows great self-confidence if nothing else.
It is not an easy read. If you are not familiar with Seventeenth Century English, you may find it hard going. I would recommend you buying the Oxford Very Short Introduction to Hobbes, or something similar, and reading it first, so as to acquire the leading ideas. This might help. It might help at first to dip in, rather than plough through in some kind of tear-stained marathon!
There is something in this book to offend everyone really, notably the chapter on the Pope, referring to him as King of the Fairies.
There is an interesting short biography of Hobbes in Aubrey's 'Brief Lives' which describes him singing every day to keep fit, and travelling with a special walking stick with an ink well fitted in the top, so that he could make notes if an idea struck him when he was out walking. Aubrey knew Hobbes personally.
The idea that power can rest upon distortions of the truth seems to have contemporary resonance, weapons of mass destruction etc.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A classic of political philosophy, 10 Mar 2009
Though the roots of social contractarianism are in Plato's Crito (360 BC) and Hugo Grotius's De jure belli ac pacis (1625) ('On the Law of War and Peace'), it is in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) that they come together to form a cohesive and radical political theory. Leviathan is the first attempt to present politics as a science: Hobbes had been impressed with the self-evidential arguments of Euclid's geometry treatise Elements and wished to use similar didactic logic to develop his early writings on materialism and human nature to their full political conclusions. Thus in his Latin edition De Cive (1642) ('On the Citizen') he attempted to establish the foundations of political legitimacy and make sense of the political turmoil that would soon explode into the English Civil War. By the time the war had begun and ended De Cive had been translated into English and published as Leviathan.
Following from Euclid's principles, Hobbes starts from the simplest foundations of his philosophy. Leviathan begins with a discussion on materialism and how humans experience reality through 'bodies in motion' before gradually coming to discuss how men interact with one another in the now-infamous Hobbesian 'state of nature'. The state of nature is the bellum omnium contra omnes - "the war of all against all" - as men are fundamentally self-interested and wish to accumulate power and possessions even at the expense of other men. It is anarchy and, compelled by fear for their own lives and possessions, men form a social contract to protect themselves from one another. By this contract men give up their natural liberty to take and do what they want to an absolute sovereign who enforces peace. This sovereign may be a king, queen, aristocracy or parliament: for Hobbes the important thing is not that the sovereign is elected or representative but that they preserve peace by whatever means necessary. (This neat trick endeared Hobbes to both Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell during the years of the English Republic and King Charles II upon the return to monarchy).
The sovereign would be the Leviathan, named after the biblical sea monster, and would have absolute authority to enforce the peace of the social contract. Their authority is to create, establish, and enforce laws and they may censor the press, make war and peace with other nations and reward and punish citizens to secure the peace. Significantly, the sovereign cannot be held accountable for their actions as the contract means that men are complicit in everything the sovereign does and so share responsibility for the sovereign's actions. Moreover to be able to judge the sovereign you must be equal to it, and to have more than one sovereign would be a contradiction as each would undermine the authority of the other and both would become redundant.
Thus an absolute sovereign could only lose power if they failed to uphold their end of the contract by threatening the lives of contractors. This extensive power and lack of accountability was terrifying to many of Hobbes's contemporaries who attempted to rewrite the theory to include a right to rebellion against arbitrary government. Notably, John Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1689) was written soon afterwards with these fears in mind.
Notoriously, Hobbes's political framework excluded religion. We suspect that he was an atheist though, probably out of expedience, he dedicates a whole section of Leviathan to Christianity and demonstrating why materialism and not theology should play the lead role in legitimising government and creating political obligations. He does this with a tidy side-step around the entire issue by declaring God to be sovereign of another realm and, until we reach that realm, men must remain sovereign on earth. Despite this effort the book was banned and burned, and Hobbes spent much of his remaining years defending himself against accusations of subversion and heresy.
It is important to note that Leviathan should not be read as a historical account of how sovereigns came to power, which is usually through conquest, usurpation or long-standing lineage. Instead, Leviathan is heuristic: a thought experiment into the consequences of removing existing sovereigns and a consideration of how we would re-establish governments with legitimacy. In this sense it is quite a conservative text. It attempts to discourage the removal of sovereigns and provides no real mechanism to do so as, by the time the Leviathan has become so despotic as to threaten your life, there is very little you can do to save yourself.
Hobbes was the first of the 'big three' social contract thinkers. He was followed by John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau who both tried to place much stricter limits on governments and make them more accountable to contractors. Nonetheless Hobbes's legacy lives on. His famous description of the state of nature being "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" is a familiar phrase in the political lexicon, while Richard Tuck and Quentin Skinner continue the debate as to whether or not Hobbes's Leviathan is guaranteed to become an authoritarian despot or could be a benevolent autocrat. The book is significant on several counts: it dismisses the Divine Right of kings which had been the basis of monarchies for centuries; it was the first attempt to treat politics as a science which is dependent on logic and reason rather than rhetoric; and it was the wellspring of a whole tradition of political thought and counter-thought. Not only this, but Hobbes can be seen everywhere. The ruler that overextends himself to tyranny and loses sovereignty is seen in countless revolutions through history, while his state of nature is evident in lawless ghettoes around the world today.
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