A multitude so united is called a commonwealth. This “Leviathan” is a mortal God.
Hobbes prefers monarchy, but all his abstract arguments are equally applicable to all forms of government in which there is one supreme authority not limited by the legal rights of other bodies. He could tolerate Parliament alone, but not a system in which governmental power is shared between king and Parliament. This is the exact antithesis to the views of Locke and Montesquieu. The English Civil War occurred, says Hobbes, because power was divided between King, Lords, and Commons.
The supreme power, whether a man or an assembly, is called the Sovereign. The powers of the sovereign, in Hobbes’s system, are unlimited. He has the right of censorship over all expression of opinion. It is assumed that his main interest is the preservation of internal peace, and that therefore he will not use the power of censorship to suppress truth, for a doctrine repugnant to peace cannot be true. (A singularly pragmatist view!) The laws of property are to be entirely subject to the sovereign; for in a state of nature there is no property,
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and therefore property is created by government, which may control its creation as it pleases.
It is admitted that the sovereign may be despotic, but even the worst despotism is better than anarchy. Moreover, in many points the interests of the sovereign are identical with those of his subjects. He is richer if they are richer, safer if they are law-abiding, and so on. Rebellion is wrong, both because it usually fails, and because, if it succeeds, it sets a bad example, and teaches others to rebel. The Aristotelian distinction between tyranny and monarchy is rejected; a “tyranny,” according to Hobbes, is merely a monarchy that the speaker happens to dislike.
Various reasons are given for preferring government by a monarch to government by an assembly. It is admitted that the monarch will usually follow his private interest when it conflicts with that of the public, but so will an assembly. A monarch may have favourites, but so may every member of an assembly; therefore the total number of favourites is likely to be fewer under a monarchy. A monarch can hear advice from anybody secretly; an assembly can only hear advice from its own members, and that publicly. In an assembly, the chance absence of some may cause a different party to obtain the majority, and thus produce a change of policy. Moreover, if the assembly is divided against itself, the result may be civil war. For all these reasons, Hobbes concludes, a monarchy is best.
Throughout the Leviathan, Hobbes never considers the possible effect of periodical elections in curbing the tendency of assemblies to sacrifice the public interest to the private interest of their members. He seems, in fact, to be thinking, not of democratically elected Parliaments, but of bodies like the Grand Council in Venice or the House of Lords in England. He conceives democracy, in the manner of antiquity, as involving the direct participation of every citizen in legislation and administration; at least, this seems to be his view.
The part of the people, in Hobbes’s system, ends completely with the first choice of a sovereign. The succession is to be determined by the sovereign, as was the practice in the Roman Empire when mutinies did not interfere. It is admitted that the sovereign will usually choose one of his own children, or a near relative if he has no children, but it is held that no law ought to prevent him from choosing otherwise.
There is a chapter on the liberty of subjects, which begins with an
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admirably precise definition: Liberty is the absence of external impediments to motion. In this sense, liberty is consistent with necessity; for instance, water necessarily flows down hill when there are no impediments to its motion, and when, therefore, according to the definition, it is free. A man is free to do what he wills, but necessitated to do what God wills. All our volitions have causes, and are in this sense necessary. As for the liberty of subjects, they are free where the laws do not interfere; this is no limitation of sovereignty, since the laws could interfere if the sovereign so decided. Subjects have no right as against the sovereign, except what the sovereign voluntarily concedes. When David caused Uriah to be killed, he did no injury to Uriah, because Uriah was his subject; but he did an injury to God, because he was God’s subject and was disobeying God’s law.
The ancient authors, with their praises of liberty, have led men, according to Hobbes, to favour tumults and seditions. He maintains that, when they are rightly interpreted, the liberty they praised was that of sovereigns, i.e., liberty from foreign domination. Internal resistance to sovereigns he condemns even when it might seem most justified. For example, he holds that Saint Ambrose had no right to excommunicate the Emperor Theodosius after the massacre of Thessalonica. And he vehemently censures Pope Zachary for having helped to depose the last of the Merovingians in favour of Pepin.
He admits, however, one limitation on the duty of submission to sovereigns. The right of self-preservation he regards as absolute, and subjects have the right of self-defence, even against monarchs. This is logical, since he has made self-preservation the motive for instituting government. On this ground he holds (though with limitations) that a man has a right to refuse to fight when called upon by the government to do so. This is a right which no modern government concedes. A curious result of his egoistic ethic is that resistance to the sovereign is only justified in self-defence; resistance in defence of another is always culpable.
There is one other quite logical exception: a man has no duty to a sovereign who has not the power to protect him. This justified Hobbes’s submission to Cromwell while Charles II was in exile.
There must of course be no such bodies as political parties or what we should now call trade unions. All teachers are to be ministers of the sovereign, and are to teach only what the sovereign thinks useful.
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The rights of property are only valid as against other subjects, not as against the sovereign. The sovereign has the right to regulate foreign trade. He is not subject to the civil law. His right to punish comes to him, not from any concept of justice, but because he retains the liberty that all men had in the state of nature, when no man could be blamed for inflicting injury on another.
There is an interesting list of the reasons (other than foreign conquest) for the dissolution of commonwealths. These are: giving too little power to the sovereign; allowing private judgement in subjects; the theory that everything that is against conscience is sin; the belief in inspiration; the doctrine that the sovereign is subject to civil laws; the recognition of absolute private property; division of the sovereign power; imitation of the Greeks and Romans; separation of temporal and spiritual powers; refusing the power of taxation to the sovereign; the popularity of potent subjects; and the liberty of disputing with the sovereign. Of all these, there were abundant instances in the then recent history of England and France.
There should not, Hobbes thinks, be much difficulty in teaching people to believe in the rights of the sovereign, for have they not been taught to believe in Christianity, and even in transubstantiation, which is contrary to reason? There should be days set apart for learning the duty of submission. The instruction of the people depends upon right teaching in the universities, which must therefore be carefully supervised. There must be uniformity of worship, the religion being that ordained by the sovereign.
Part II ends with the hope that some sovereign will read the book and make himself absolute–a less chimerical hope than Plato’s, that some king would turn philosopher. Monarchs are assured that the book is easy reading and quite interesting.
Part III, “Of a Christian Common-wealth,” explains that there is no universal Church, because the Church must depend upon the civil government. In each country, the king must be head of the Church; the Pope’s overlordship and infallibility cannot be admitted. It argues, as might be expected, that a Christian who is a subject of a non-Christian sovereign should yield outwardly, for was not Naaman suffered to bow himself in the house of Rimmon?
Part IV, “Of the Kingdom of Darkness,” is mainly concerned with criticism of the Church of Rome, which Hobbes hates because it puts
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the spiritual power
