Thomas Hobbes died in 1679, but the questions he raised about who should hold ultimate power and why we should obey them have never gone away. His masterwork, Leviathan, is still ranked alongside the political writings of Plato, Aristotle, Locke, and Rousseau as one of the founding texts of the discipline. What makes Hobbes worth studying today is not just his defence of a powerful sovereign, but the radical method he used to justify it. By grounding political authority in human reason and consent rather than divine will, he changed the very vocabulary of politics. This post examines that legacy: the shift he triggered, the liberal seeds he planted, and the debates his theory continues to provoke.
Table of Contents
From divine right to rational consent
Before Hobbes, the dominant explanation for why kings ruled was the divine right of kings. Rulers claimed their authority came directly from God, which meant questioning the king was close to questioning the Almighty. Hobbes broke decisively with this tradition. He argued that legitimate political authority arises from a social contract, an agreement among individuals to surrender certain freedoms to a sovereign in exchange for peace and security.
This was a profound reversal. The social contract idea located the source of power in human agreement rather than heavenly mandate. The intellectual climate of seventeenth-century England made this possible. As one analysis of the period notes, the end of rule by divine right meant the state could now be regarded as a structure crafted by human beings rather than a condition ordained by God. Once the state was seen as something people built, it became something people could study, criticise, and improve.
The implications were enormous. If authority comes from the consent of the governed, then legitimacy depends on people, not deities. This logic eventually fed into the development of constitutional government, where power flows from a written document reflecting popular will. Hobbes himself wanted an absolute ruler, but the reasoning he used to get there pointed in a direction he never intended.
Why this shift still matters
The move from divine right to rational consent is the hinge on which modern political legitimacy turns. According to scholar Quentin Skinner, the publication of Leviathan was a ground-breaking moment because Hobbes articulated, for the first time, the theory of state sovereignty that has dominated political discourse ever since. Skinner draws attention to passages where Hobbes treats sovereigns not as owners of their power but as temporary holders of an office representing the commonwealth. That distinction, between the person who rules and the office of rule itself, is central to how we think about the modern state today.
The individual as the foundation of politics
One of Hobbes’ most lasting contributions is methodological. He built his entire political system from the ground up, starting with the individual. In his account, society does not exist first with individuals slotted into it. Instead, separate individuals come together to create society and government. As one study of Hobbesian liberalism puts it, this means the individual comes before society, and the parts come before the whole.
This atomistic view of human beings, where each person is a self-contained unit driven by self-preservation and rational self-interest, is the bedrock of much later liberal thought. Hobbes assumed that in the absence of authority, individuals would act purely to protect themselves, producing the famous “war of all against all.” His solution required those individuals to reason their way out of conflict by collectively authorising a sovereign.
Seeds of liberal theory
It seems strange that the defender of absolute power should be called a founder of liberalism, yet the label fits in important ways. Hobbes wrote about individualism, liberty, and a fundamental equality among people. The Yale political philosophy course on Leviathan highlights this tension directly: Hobbes is a stern defender of absolutism, yet he simultaneously insists on the fundamental equality of all human beings in the state of nature.
Scholars have long noticed these proto-liberal features. As a study of popular sovereignty observes, Hobbes’ affinities for individuality, natural rights, and the popular authorisation of sovereign power have been recognised by both his critics and his admirers, even if these aspects are often overshadowed by his endorsement of absolute monarchy. The thinker who came after him, John Locke, took the same starting point, the individual in a state of nature, and arrived at a limited, rights-protecting government instead. Hobbes supplied the framework; liberalism filled it with different content.
The debate over absolutism and perpetuity
No part of Hobbes’ theory has generated more argument than his insistence that sovereignty must be absolute, undivided, and permanent. He believed that if the sovereign could not control every aspect of political life, unresolved conflicts would eventually tear the commonwealth apart and drag everyone back into the chaos of the state of nature. For Hobbes, divided sovereignty was no sovereignty at all.
Critics from his own day onward found this deeply troubling. Royalists disliked his secular justification, preferring divine-right arguments, while parliamentarians and republicans saw his absolutism as a defence of tyranny. The worry was straightforward: a sovereign with unlimited power could easily slide into oppression, with no legitimate way for subjects to resist.
Did Hobbes undermine his own absolutism?
Interestingly, many modern scholars argue that Hobbes’ theory is not as absolutist as it first appears. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy points out that Hobbes reserves for subjects a right of self-defence against the sovereign. People retain the right to disobey or resist when their lives are in danger, and he grants seemingly broad resistance rights when their families or honour are at stake. These “true liberties of subjects” look hard to square with a doctrine of unlimited sovereign power.
A detailed academic study argues that Leviathan undermines its own absolutism in several ways. Sovereignty is made conditional on the sovereign’s ability to ensure the safety of the people, and subjects hold inalienable rights even against the ruler, so that when their preservation is threatened they are no longer obliged to obey. This is the famous problem of political obligation: if the sovereign exists to protect us, what happens when it fails to do so? The Stanford account notes that some commentators treat this question as the Achilles’ heel of Hobbes’ theory, because it suggests people never truly leave the state of nature.
There is, however, a real tension in pinning down where the limits lie. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy observes that, on Hobbes’ own account, neither the philosopher nor the citizen ultimately decides what counts as the proper scope of sovereignty. To allow some outside authority to judge the sovereign would simply relocate sovereignty to that judge, creating an endless regress. This is precisely why Hobbes insists the buck must stop somewhere absolute.
Hobbes and the world of states
Hobbes’ influence extends well beyond domestic politics into the study of international relations. His picture of individuals in a lawless state of nature was readily applied to states themselves. Just as individuals without a common power live in fear and conflict, sovereign states without an overarching authority face a condition of permanent anarchy. This “domestic analogy” became foundational for the realist tradition in international relations.
The connection is not entirely straightforward, though. As an analysis of realist theory explains, neorealists locate the source of international conflict in the structure of the state system rather than in human nature, while classical realists root it in human nature itself, which creates a genuine divergence in how each school invokes Hobbes. Some classical realists, including Hans Morgenthau, even criticised Hobbes for not following his own logic to its conclusion by calling for a single dominant world state. The debate over what Hobbes really implied for global order continues among scholars, with serious work like the Yale Law Journal essay on Hobbes and international order arguing that his theory of civil sovereignty was meant to solve both interpersonal and international conflict at once.
A living legacy
What makes Hobbes endure is the productive tension running through his thought. He defended absolute power using arguments, individualism, consent, equality, and self-preservation, that would later be turned against absolute power. His method survived even where his conclusions were rejected. Thinkers across the spectrum continue to engage him: defenders such as C.B. Macpherson praise his realism for laying the groundwork for modern political theory by emphasising rational consent over divine or traditional authority, while critics use him as the foil against which liberal democratic values are defined.
For anyone trying to understand the modern state, with its claim to a monopoly on legitimate force within a territory, its derivation of authority from the people, and its constant negotiation between order and liberty, Hobbes is the indispensable starting point. He framed the central questions of sovereignty so sharply that we are still working through his answers, accepting some, rejecting others, but rarely able to ignore them.
What do you think? If a government’s authority truly rests on its ability to protect its citizens, at what point does that authority dissolve when protection fails? And given how Hobbes’ individualist method later fuelled liberalism, can the same starting assumptions about human nature genuinely justify both absolute power and limited, rights-based government?
References
- https://www.britannica.com/topic/social-contract
- https://www.lawteacher.net/free-law-essays/contract-law/the-social-contract-theories-of-thomas-hobbes-and-john-locke.php
- https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09608788.2019.1613632
- https://uca.edu/cahss/files/2020/07/Katelyn-Wilkins-Hobbesian-Liberalism.pdf
- https://oyc.yale.edu/political-science/plsc-114/lecture-12
- https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/when-the-people-rule/thomas-hobbes-and-the-making-of-popular-sovereignty/2E5AAF3BD987F5BD750F180C5DE91828
- https://www.sociologyguide.com/thinkers/thomas-hobbes.php
- https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hobbes-moral/
- https://kar.kent.ac.uk/72235/
- https://iep.utm.edu/hobmoral/
- https://www.e-ir.info/2022/02/22/tracing-hobbes-in-realist-international-relations-theory/
- https://yalelawjournal.org/essay/the-domestic-analogy-revisited-hobbes-on-international-order
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