The Absolute Powers and Privileges of the Hobbesian Sovereign

Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan in 1651, in the shadow of the English Civil War. Having watched a kingdom tear itself apart, he reached a startling conclusion: the only escape from chaos is to hand over near-total power to a single authority. This authority is the sovereign, and in Hobbes’s design it holds powers so vast and so concentrated that they leave almost no room for dissent. To understand why he believed this was not tyranny but salvation, we need to look closely at exactly what the sovereign can do, what subjects owe in return, and why Hobbes thought even a harsh ruler was a price worth paying.

Where the sovereign’s power comes from 🔗

For Hobbes, all political authority begins in the state of nature, a condition without any common power to keep people in awe. In this condition, every individual has a right to everything, and the result is a permanent threat of violence. To escape it, people enter a social contract, agreeing among themselves to transfer their natural right of self-defence to one person or assembly. That recipient becomes the sovereign.

This transfer is the crucial move. The covenant is made between the subjects with each other, not between the subjects and the ruler. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, when subjects institute a sovereign by authorizing it, they agree not to hold it liable for its judgments and not to treat its actions as injustices done to them. Because the sovereign never signed the contract, it cannot break it. This single structural feature is the source of nearly all the powers that follow.

The essential powers of the sovereign 🔗

In Chapter 18 of Leviathan, Hobbes lists the rights that, in his words, make the essence of sovereignty. He insists these rights are “incommunicable and inseparable,” meaning they cannot be divided up or handed out to different bodies without destroying the commonwealth itself. Below are the most important of them.

The power to make and enforce law 🔗

The sovereign is the sole legislator. The sovereign has the right to make the rules of the commonwealth, by which every subject’s property and person is protected from injustice. Law, for Hobbes, is simply the command of the sovereign. There is no higher standard of justice that the sovereign’s law must match, because outside the commonwealth there is no settled justice at all. This is why Hobbes can argue that nothing the sovereign commands can be unjust in the strict sense.

The power to judge all controversies 🔗

Alongside making law, the sovereign holds the right to sit in judgment over disputes. Someone has to decide what the law means in a particular case, and that final authority rests with the sovereign. If two parties disagree and there were no supreme judge, every quarrel would risk sliding back toward the violence of the state of nature. The sovereign’s role as ultimate arbiter is meant to prevent that slide.

The power over knowledge and opinion 🔗

One of the most striking powers concerns ideas themselves. The sovereign may determine what doctrines are acceptable and may censor opinions that are repugnant to peace. Hobbes took this seriously because he believed the Civil War had been fuelled by competing religious and political doctrines. If people disagree fundamentally about what is true and just, he reasoned, they will eventually fight over it. So the sovereign decides which teachings are fit to be taught, particularly in matters likely to cause discord.

The power to appoint officials and reward and punish 🔗

A ruler cannot govern alone. The sovereign therefore holds the right to choose all counsellors, ministers, and magistrates needed to run the commonwealth. The sovereign also controls the system of rewards and punishments, deciding what honours subjects may receive and what penalties they face. This lets the sovereign shape behaviour throughout the state, since all subordinate authority flows downward from the single source at the top.

The power to make war and peace 🔗

The sovereign alone judges what is necessary for the defence of the commonwealth. This includes the right to raise armies, command the military, levy the taxes needed to fund it, and decide when to declare war or make peace with other nations. Because external threats are as dangerous as internal ones, Hobbes placed control of the entire apparatus of war squarely in the sovereign’s hands.

Why these powers cannot be divided 🔗

Hobbes was emphatic that the powers above must stay together in one place. He pointed directly to recent history to make his case. He argued that the belief that power was divided between the King, the Lords, and the House of Commons had instructed people in the idea of divided sovereignty and helped push England into civil war. For Hobbes, a divided sovereign is no sovereign at all, because competing authorities will inevitably clash.

This is why he describes the rights of sovereignty as inseparable. If the sovereign appears to grant away an essential power while still keeping the name and substance of sovereignty, the grant is void. The logic is uncompromising: either authority is unified, or it is heading toward collapse. There is no stable middle position in his scheme.

What subjects owe the sovereign 🔗

The flip side of unlimited authority is near-unconditional obedience. Having authorized the sovereign, subjects are bound to obey its commands. Hobbes pushes this further than most readers expect. He argues that actions a subject performs in obedience to the sovereign are the sovereign’s actions, not the subject’s own, which means subjects cannot complain that they have been wronged by laws they themselves authorized.

Subjects also cannot accuse the sovereign of injustice, nor may they punish it. A sovereign can do no injury to subjects, and subjects are not permitted to accuse a sovereign of injustice or to harm it for any perceived offence. Hobbes even ties this to religion: because the subject is acting as an instrument of the sovereign, he suggests subjects need not fear divine punishment for obeying commands they personally find objectionable. The whole architecture is built to remove every excuse for disobedience.

Is the sovereign bound by any law? 🔗

In the strict legal sense, no. The sovereign makes the civil law and so cannot be bound by it, since it could free itself whenever it wished. Hobbes does say the sovereign is bound by the laws of nature to seek the good of the people, but there is a catch. Because there is no power above the sovereign, there is no earthly authority to enforce this duty. The obligation is real for Hobbes, but it answers only to God and conscience, not to any court or parliament of subjects.

The one limit: self-preservation 🔗

For all this talk of absolute power, Hobbes leaves a single, narrow exception. The entire reason people created the sovereign was to protect their lives. So if the sovereign threatens a subject’s life, or if it can no longer provide protection at all, the subject’s obligation dissolves. Political obligation ends when protection ceases, because the contract was about security in the first place. A condemned man may resist his executioners, and a defeated population may transfer its allegiance to whoever can now keep it safe.

This limit is genuine, but it is also very thin. It protects bare survival, not freedom, comfort, or political voice. It does not give subjects any right to reform the government, criticise its policies, or remove a ruler they dislike. It is a floor beneath which the sovereign cannot push, not a set of rights that constrains everyday governance.

Why even a cruel sovereign is better than chaos 🔗

The obvious objection is that this design invites abuse. Hobbes did not deny that absolute power could be misused. His response was comparative. The miseries of even an oppressive government, he wrote, are barely noticeable next to the horrible calamities that accompany a civil war. Order under a harsh ruler still allows farming, trade, learning, and family life. The collapse into the state of nature allows none of it.

This is the heart of Hobbes’s argument. He had lived through what happens when central authority breaks down, and he judged that almost any settled power was preferable. The risk of a bad sovereign was, in his eyes, far smaller than the certainty of disaster once authority fractures. Whether that trade is acceptable is precisely where later thinkers like Locke and Rousseau parted ways with him, building theories that placed real limits on what governments could rightfully do.

What do you think? Is Hobbes right that the danger of an abusive ruler is always smaller than the danger of no ruler at all? And in a modern constitutional democracy, where power is deliberately divided and limited, does his warning about divided sovereignty still hold any weight?

References

1. https://iep.utm.edu/soc-cont/
2. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hobbes-moral/
3. https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/thomas-hobbes/leviathan/text/chapter-18
4. https://www.litcharts.com/lit/leviathan/chapter-18-of-the-rights-of-soveraignes-by-institution
5. https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/leviathan/section6/
6. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Leviathan-by-Hobbes
7. https://learn.saylor.org/mod/book/view.php?id=30595&chapterid=6560
8. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-politics/article/abs/leviathan-no-more-the-right-of-nature-and-the-limits-of-sovereignty-in-hobbes/67267A558B3CB4E6B6ED19B0A8AC1F86
9. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2007/entries/hobbes-moral/