In the most famous passage of Leviathan he says that in a state of nature there are ‘no arts no letters no society and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’ Human existence in a state of nature is, according to Hobbes, pretty undesirable.

Hobbes grounds Leviathan in a state of nature – a theoretical situation in which humans have no institutions, no government, no coercive power – a pre-societal condition. To understand politics, he argued, you had to understand people. Hobbes’ originality was his belief that political theory could be deduced from scientific principles about psychology, the senses, language, morality, knowledge, and power. Nuanced and original, he is probably the most influential figure in modern political philosophy who, and could be described as the father of both modern liberalism and modern conservatism. Hobbes looms over all of us as the preeminent defender of the modern state and sovereign authority. As the sovereign power of a common-wealth is unmatched and gathers all its power from its subjects, Leviathan is an apt symbol for a common-wealth’s strength, as there is nothing on Earth that can be rightly compared to Leviathan.An introduction to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. Hee seeth every high thing below him and is King of all the children of pride.” As Hobbes argues that a fear of violence and of God drove humankind to create the common-wealth, it is particularly noteworthy that God made Leviathan not to be afraid. On the original cover of Hobbes’s book, Leviathan is depicted as a giant man whose body is made up of all the individual subjects of the common-wealth.Īccording to Hobbes, God made the “great power of Leviathan,” named him “King of the Proud” and said: “ There is nothing on earth, to be compared with him. Hobbes mentions Leviathan several times in his book and likens the beast to the “Artificial man” that is “the great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE.” This analogy is exactly how Hobbes sees the ideal common-wealth: many people united under a single sovereign power, who are stronger together than they could ever be alone.

In Thomas Hobbes’s philosophical discourse by the same name, Leviathan is symbolic of the ideal common-wealth. Leviathan, a sea monster from the biblical Book of Job that is usually depicted as giant crocodile, is used within Christianity as a metaphor for the power of people united as one.

Leviathan thomas hobbes meaning