Hobbes: The Contract Into Absolute Sovereignty

In one line

Hobbes says life without government is so unbearable that rational people would hand over everything to a sovereign with no limits, and having handed it over they can never take it back.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Hobbes holds that in the state of nature, where there is no common power to keep men in awe, there is a war of every man against every man in which life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short; that reason therefore dictates a covenant by which every man surrenders his right of governing himself to a sovereign, on condition that every other man does the same; and that since the sovereign is not a party to that covenant, the sovereign's power is absolute, indivisible and irrevocable, and the subject has no right of resistance except where life itself is directly threatened.

The state of nature

Hobbes begins from human nature rather than from history. Men are roughly equal in body and mind, so that even the weakest can kill the strongest by stealth or by combining with others. From equality comes equality of hope; from equality of hope, competition for the same things; and from competition, war.

He identifies three causes of quarrel: competition, for gain; diffidence, meaning distrust, for safety; and glory, for reputation.

The result is the condition he calls warre, and he is careful about the word: war does not consist only in fighting but in the known disposition to it, as foul weather lies not in a shower or two but in an inclination to rain over many days.

What is lost in that condition is the famous passage. There is no place for industry, because the fruit is uncertain; no cultivation of the earth, no navigation, no building, no arts, no letters, no society; and, worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death. And, in Hobbes's own words, the life of man is "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."

Is it a historical claim? Hobbes anticipates the objection and answers it in the same passage: a man who doubts the inference from the passions should consider his own conduct, arming himself when he takes a journey and locking his doors at night, and ask what opinion he has of his fellow subjects when he rides armed. The state of nature is a claim about what people are, evidenced by what they do inside a state.

Natural right and natural law

The right of nature, in Hobbes, is the liberty of each to use their own power for the preservation of their own life, and to do anything they judge necessary to it. In that condition every man has a right to everything, including to another's body, which is why the right is worthless: a right everybody has to everything secures nothing to anybody.