Hobbes Publishes Leviathan
Life without government, Hobbes writes, is a war of every man against every man
Quick facts
- Author
- Thomas Hobbes
- Work
- Leviathan
- Published
- 1651
- Key idea
- Social contract, state of nature, absolute sovereign
What happened
Thomas Hobbes published Leviathan in 1651, during the aftermath of the English Civil War, arguing that people in a hypothetical "state of nature" without any government would be locked in a war of every man against every man, making life, in his famous phrase, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. To escape that condition, Hobbes argued, individuals rationally agree to a social contract, surrendering their private right to use force to a single sovereign authority, the Leviathan of the title, in exchange for protection and order. He treated this sovereign's authority as close to absolute, since any division of power risked collapsing back into civil war.
Why it matters
Leviathan made the state's authority a product of human agreement rather than divine right, a move that reframed political legitimacy in terms every later Enlightenment political theorist, including Locke and Rousseau, had to answer directly, usually by rejecting Hobbes's absolutism while keeping his social-contract framework.
How we know
Leviathan survives in its original 1651 English printing; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on Hobbes's moral and political philosophy dates the work and summarizes its argument from that text and Hobbes's other writings.
Sources
- Thomas Hobbes (Project Gutenberg). Leviathan · Primary source (author-declared)gutenberg.org · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Hobbes's Moral and Political Philosophy · Reputable sourceplato.stanford.edu · The domain "plato.stanford.edu" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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