Thomas Hobbes was a seventeenth-century English philosopher, who believed in a very powerful government.
HIs most famous book was “Leviathan”, where he stated that humans were naturally greedy, angry, and criminal humans.
According to Hobbes, all societies needed a form of authorities to control these people and prevent them from going crazy basically.
According to Hobbes, this problem could be solved by entering into what is called a social contract.
In the Enlightenment, this meant giving up your freedom and power to a government or King in order to protect your basic rights and safety.
Thomas Hobbes also insisted on the need for the law and a higher justice. Without some form of law or judgment, the world would just do whatever they wanted.
So, when we talk about doing away with police, Hobbes saw, all the way back in the 1600’s what would happen without law and order.
Basically, Hobbes was telling us that all the social contract theory says is that, if we are part of a social contract, then we’re morally bound to give up our liberty to enforce laws, and the government that is given that authority is legitimate.
Our American government is a product of numerous Enlightenment thinkers, who thrived in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
Thomas Hobbes was one of them. While some of Hobbes’ ideas were contrary to American governing principles — like his belief in absolute power over a government’s subjects — many were consistent with the ideas presented in the country’s founding documents.
While many of his ideas on social contracts, equality and natural liberties inspired the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, others were not truly integrated into the U.S. philosophy of government until after the Civil War.
When Hobbes imagined what life would be like without government, he concluded it would be “nasty, brutish, and short.”
He envisioned individuals constantly vying with each other for their own self-interest and attacking others in pursuit of those interests.
Now I ask you, does this not perfectly describe what we are seeing on the evening news taking place right now in major cities across the US?
From this pessimistic view comes a foundation of American government rooted in Hobbes theory: the social compact.
Hobbes believed that to enforce law and prevent the chaos of the state of nature, people consented to forming a government.
This idea is written into the preamble of the U.S. Constitution, when “We the People” establish a government to do things like “ensure domestic tranquility” and “promote the general welfare.”
When the Declaration of Independence was written, it specified that “all men are created equal, and endowed… with certain unalienable rights.”
While this idea also comes from the philosopher John Locke, who I plan on discussing in next week’s show, Thomas Hobbes contributed significantly to the idea of natural liberties as well.
Hobbes believed that all subjects of a government had the right to defend themselves against, and even overthrow, a government that no longer supported them.
This, of course, is the main idea behind the Declaration of Independence and the establishment of the United States.
The Second Amendment to the Constitution, which states that a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, supports a Hobbes’s view on self-defense.
Now here is something important to remember. Our forefathers did not create our government in a vacuum. Every one of them was very well read. They all came to the table knowing their history.
So when they sat down to “form a more perfect Union”, they did so by referring to the writings and teachings of the great minds who came before them.
Think about this. At the time, We were the only people in the world with the opportunity to form a new government from scratch.
Prior to this, the rulers either inherited the job of being a King, Queen, Emperor, or Czar or they conquered a neighbor and transferred their government to the new land.
We took all of the best ideas for governing at that time, and created something entirely new. A Federal Republic.
People were shocked when they saw what our forefathers had come up with. Many thought we would have a monarchy with George Washington as King.
No one had thought of how 13 states would all share power.
Bear in mind, we started from scratch. No supreme ruler, no parliament, no judicial system. We had to create it all.
Now again, our forefathers were brilliant in creating the system we have, but the real brilliance came when they did their research and used the writing and teachings of great minds of the past to develop their new government.
In other words, they called upon their history! This is one reason why we should all be outraged at the current movement to destroy our history, both good and bad.
Our forefathers grandparents survived the English Civil War and they themselves survived the rule of a tyrant king.
So when they sat down to create a new government they knew exactly what mistakes were made in the past, and took steps to assure they would not create a system that would allow those things to happen again.
Now as our forefathers looked at Hobbe’s teachings they found something else they thought should be included.
According to Hobbes, in a world without government, all people were inherently equal. In fact, their equality was partly what made life so terrible, because no single person was ever able to rise above anyone else.
Hobbes thought equality needed to be protected, and U.S. government has evolved to more firmly embrace the concept of equality.
After the Civil War, the adoption of the 14th Amendment, for example, forbade any jurisdiction from denying a person equality before the law. Before that, the Declaration of Independence, which stated that all men are created equal, provided only a conceptual foundation for equality in government.
Hobbes believed that the tendency towards self-preservation was a natural instinct and should be a cornerstone of governing principles.
In American government, the principle was first stated in the Declaration of Independence as the fact that all men are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Hobbes thought preserving one’s own life was the primary goal. In the U.S. Constitution, the post-Civil War 14th Amendment explicitly forbids any state from depriving a person of life, liberty or property without due process of law.
Now, just like our forefathers, Thomas Hobbes also had a history that influenced his writings.
Thomas Hobbes was born in Westport, England, on April 5, 1588. His dad was the disgraced vicar of a local parish, and in the wake of the scandal (caused by brawling in front of his own church) he disappeared, abandoning his three children to the care of his brother.
This uncle of Hobbes’, a tradesman and alderman, provided for Hobbes’ education.
Already an excellent student of classical languages, at age 14 Hobbes went to Magdalen Hall in Oxford to study. He then left Oxford in 1608 and became the private tutor for William Cavendish, the eldest son of Lord Cavendish (later known as the first Earl of Devonshire).
In 1610, Hobbes traveled with William to France, Italy and Germany, where he met other leading scholars of the day.
Through his association with the Cavendish family, Hobbes entered circles where the activities of the king, members of Parliament, and other wealthy landowners were discussed, and his intellectual abilities brought him close to power (although he never became a powerful figure himself).
Through these channels, he began to observe the influence and structures of power and government. Also, the young William Cavendish was a member of Parliament (1614 and 1621), and Hobbes would have sat in on various parliamentary debates.
In the late 1630s, Hobbes became linked with the royalists in disputes between the king and Parliament, as the two factions were in conflict over the scope of kingly powers, especially regarding raising money for armies.
In 1640, Hobbes wrote a piece defending King Charles I’s wide interpretation of his own rights in these matters, and royalist members of Parliament used sections of Hobbes’ writings in debates.
The writings were circulated, and The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic became Hobbes’ first work of political philosophy (although he never intended it to be published as a book).
The conflict between the King and Parliament then led to the English Civil Wars (1642-1651), which led to the king being executed and a republic being declared.
Hobbes then left the country to preserve his personal safety, living in France from 1640 to 1651.
Now to drive home the point of everyone having a history, consider this.
Hobbes had never been trained in mathematics or the sciences at Oxford, nor previously at Wiltshire.
But one branch of the Cavendish family, the Wellbecks, were scientifically and mathematically minded, and Hobbes’ growing interest in these areas was stirred mainly through his association with certain family members and through various conversations he’d had and reading he’d done on the Continent.
In 1629 or 1630, it is reported that Hobbes found a volume of Euclid and fell in love with geometry and Euclid’s method of demonstrating theorems.
Later, he had gained enough independent knowledge to pursue research in optics, a field he would lay claim to as a pioneer. In fact, Hobbes was gaining a reputation in many fields: mathematics (especially geometry), translation (of the classics), and law.
He also became well known (notorious, in fact) for his writings and disputes on religious subjects. He was also respected as a theorist in ethics and politics.
His love of mathematics and a fascination with the properties of matter–sizes, shapes, positions, etc.–laid the foundation for 3 books he wrote known as the Elements of Philosophy trilogy: De Cive (1642; “Concerning the Citizen”), De Corpore (1655; “Concerning Body”) and De Homine (1658; “Concerning Man”).
The trilogy was his attempt to arrange the components of natural science, psychology and politics into a hierarchy, from the most fundamental to the most specific.
In 1642, Hobbes released De Cive, his first published book of political philosophy. Although it was to be the third book in Elements, Hobbes wrote it first to address the civil unrest in England at the time.
While still in Paris, Hobbes began work on what would become his greatest work and one of the most influential books ever written: Leviathan.
It is important to note that Leviathan, was written during the English Civil Wars (1642-1651), and for that reason, Hobbes argues for the necessity of the social contract, in which individuals mutually unite into political societies, agreeing to abide by common rules and accept duties to protect themselves and one another from whatever might come their way.
He also calls for rule by an absolute sovereign, saying that chaos–and other situations identified with a “state of nature” (a pre-government state in which individuals’ actions are bound only by those individuals’ desires and restraints)–could be averted only by a strong central government, one with the power of the biblical Leviathan (a sea creature), which would protect people from their own selfishness.
He also warned of “the war of all against all”, a motto that went on to greater fame and represented Hobbes’ view of humanity without government.
As Hobbes lays out his thoughts on the foundation of states and legitimate government, he does it methodically: The state is created by humans, so he first describes human nature.
He says that in each of us can be found a representation of general humanity and that all acts are ultimately self-serving–that in a state of nature, humans would behave completely selfishly.
He concludes that humanity’s natural condition is a state of perpetual war, fear and lack of morality, and that only government can hold a society together.
Hobbes’ ideas helped form the building blocks of nearly all Western political thought, including the right of the individual and the importance of republican government rather than mob rule.
The historical importance of his political philosophy cannot be overstated. The teachings of Thomas Hobbes had a tremendous influence on our forefathers and many of the basic principals embedded in our society today.
So there you have it folks. Was Thomas Hobbes right?
Are we naturally greedy, angry, and criminal humans that must submit to an all powerful government to keep us from going crazy?
Or were our forefathers correct in taking his teachings and developing a government based on laws but still enforcing certain inalienable rights?
There are those today who would gladly destroy the system we have, only to create the society Hobbes warned us about.