Hobbes on the State of War and Natural Rights in the State of Nature

Picture a world with no police, no courts, no laws, and no government of any kind. Every person is left entirely to their own judgement about how to survive. Would people cooperate peacefully, or would life descend into chaos? Thomas Hobbes, writing during the upheaval of the English Civil War, gave a stark answer. For him, a world without a common authority was not a paradise of freedom but a battlefield. This is the heart of his theory of the state of nature, the state of war, and the natural right to self-preservation, ideas that form the foundation of his masterpiece, Leviathan (1651).

What is the state of nature? 🔗

The state of nature is Hobbes’s way of describing human life before any government, laws, or political authority existed. It is a thought experiment: strip away the state and ask what human beings are really like underneath. Hobbes was not the only thinker to use this device, but his conclusion was unusually grim. He completely rejected Aristotle’s view that humans are naturally social creatures who instinctively cooperate for the common good. Instead, he argued that people are driven by self-interest and the desire to survive at any cost.

This pessimism did not appear out of nowhere. Hobbes lived through the English Civil War, a period when central authority collapsed and the country dissolved into violence. For him, this conflict was living proof of what happens when a strong sovereign power disappears. His political philosophy was not an abstract academic exercise; it was a response to real disorder he witnessed first-hand.

The equality that creates danger 🔗

One of Hobbes’s most striking claims is that all human beings are roughly equal in body and mind. This sounds like a hopeful idea, but Hobbes turns it into a source of fear. Even the weakest person, he argues, has enough strength to kill the strongest, whether through cunning, secret plotting, or by teaming up with others. No one is so powerful that they can feel permanently safe.

This equality matters because it removes any natural hierarchy that might keep order. If everyone has a roughly equal chance of harming everyone else, then everyone becomes a potential threat. From equality flows equal hope of achieving one’s goals, and from competing hopes flows conflict.

Why the state of nature becomes a state of war 🔗

Hobbes argues that without a common power to keep people in awe, human beings inevitably slide into conflict. He famously called this condition the “war of every man against every man” (in Latin, bellum omnium contra omnes). It is important to understand what he meant by “war” here. He did not mean constant fighting at every moment, but a persistent readiness to fight, where the threat of violence is always present and no one can ever truly relax.

In this condition, Hobbes offers his bleakest and most quoted line. He describes life in the state of nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” With no security, there is no incentive to build, farm, trade, or create. Why plant crops if a stronger neighbour will simply take the harvest? Civilisation itself becomes impossible.

The three causes of quarrel 🔗

Hobbes does not simply assert that humans are violent. He identifies three principal causes of quarrel rooted in human nature. Understanding these three drivers is essential to grasping why peace is so difficult without a government.

Competition. People fight for gain. Resources in the state of nature are scarce, and two people often desire the same thing that they cannot both enjoy. This drives individuals to use violence to make themselves masters of other people’s possessions, families, and labour.

Diffidence. This is an older word meaning mistrust or fear. Because no one feels secure, each person has reason to suspect attack from others. The most rational response is often to strike first before being struck, attacking pre-emptively for the sake of safety. This logic of fear traps everyone in a cycle of suspicion.

Glory. People also fight for reputation. They use violence over trifles, as Hobbes puts it, over a word, a smile, a different opinion, or any sign of being undervalued. The need to be respected and to deter future challengers pushes people toward aggression even when no material gain is involved.

Morality disappears in the state of war 🔗

A shocking consequence follows from Hobbes’s argument. In the state of nature, there is no right or wrong, no justice or injustice. Hobbes states plainly that the notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have no place where there is no common power. Justice and injustice are qualities of people living in society, not of people living in isolation. Without laws, nothing can be unjust, because there is no shared standard to break. This is why the state of nature is so terrifying: it is a moral vacuum where survival is the only rule.

The natural right to self-preservation 🔗

If the state of nature is so bleak, what guides human action within it? Hobbes’s answer is the Right of Nature, which he calls by its Latin name, jus naturale. This is the cornerstone of his entire argument and the foundation on which the social contract is later built.

Hobbes defines the Right of Nature as the liberty each person has to use their own power as they wish for the preservation of their own life. In other words, every individual has the freedom to do whatever their own judgement and reason tell them is the best means to stay alive. This right is not granted by any king, government, or law. It exists naturally, prior to and independent of any political authority. It is the most fundamental claim a human being can make.

A right to everything, even another’s body 🔗

Here Hobbes pushes his logic to its extreme. Because the state of nature is a condition of war, and because each person is the sole judge of what they need to survive, it follows that every person has a right to everything, even to one another’s body. There is nothing that could not potentially help someone preserve their life against an enemy, so nothing is off-limits.

But this universal right creates a fatal problem. If everyone has a right to everything, then in practice no one has a secure right to anything. My right to your possessions clashes directly with your right to keep them. As long as this unlimited right endures, Hobbes argues, there can be no security for anyone, no matter how strong or clever they are. The natural right meant to ensure survival paradoxically guarantees that survival remains constantly at risk.

Right versus law: a crucial distinction 🔗

Hobbes is careful to separate two ideas that other writers often confused. A right (jus) is a liberty to do or not do something. A law (lex) is an obligation that binds you to a particular action. As Hobbes puts it, right consists in the liberty to act or refrain, whereas law determines and binds you to one of them. They are opposites in the same matter, because one cannot be both free and obligated at once.

This distinction sets up the next move in his argument. The Right of Nature gives us total freedom, but a separate Law of Nature (lex naturalis) is a general rule discovered by reason that forbids us from doing anything destructive to our own lives. Reason tells us that the chaotic exercise of our unlimited right is precisely what is destroying our chances of survival.

From war to peace: the path to the social contract 🔗

Hobbes does not leave us trapped in the state of war. He argues that reason itself shows us the way out. The fundamental driver here is fear of violent death, which Hobbes treats as the greatest evil that human beings naturally seek to avoid. This rational fear becomes the engine of peace.

From this, Hobbes derives his first and most important Law of Nature. He states it as a precept: every person ought to seek peace as far as they have hope of obtaining it, and only when peace is impossible may they use the advantages of war. The first branch of this rule is simple and powerful: seek peace and follow it.

Laying down the right to all things 🔗

The second Law of Nature follows directly. To achieve peace, a person should be willing, when others are willing too, to give up their unlimited right to all things and be content with as much liberty against others as they would allow others against themselves. This mutual surrender is the basis of the social contract. I give up my right to harm you, on the condition that you give up your right to harm me.

There is one critical exception. The right of self-preservation can never be fully surrendered. Hobbes insists that no one can lay down the right to resist those who assault them with force to take their life, because no one could rationally aim at their own harm. A person cannot be understood to have given up the very right that motivated the contract in the first place. This is why self-preservation is the one inalienable right in Hobbes’s system.

Why a sovereign is necessary 🔗

But here lies Hobbes’s dilemma. Agreeing to seek peace is not enough, because some people will always break their promises, cheat, or attack when it suits them. A covenant without the sword is just empty words. For the contract to hold, there must be a power strong enough to enforce it and to keep everyone in awe. This is why individuals must collectively surrender their right to self-rule and vest authority in a sovereign powerful enough to maintain order. This mighty authority is the Leviathan, the “mortal god” that lifts humanity out of the state of war and makes peaceful, secure life finally possible.

Why Hobbes still matters 🔗

Hobbes’s framework remains one of the most influential arguments in political theory. His logic continues to shape how we think about international relations, where sovereign states, having no global authority above them, are often described as existing in a Hobbesian state of nature with respect to one another. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that this view has made Hobbes the representative example of a “realist” in international relations. His questions about authority, security, and the price of order remain central to debates about why we obey the state and what we owe it in return.

Whether or not we accept his bleak picture of human nature, Hobbes forces us to confront an uncomfortable question: how much of our freedom are we willing to trade for safety and order?

What do you think? Is Hobbes right that, without a powerful authority, human life would inevitably collapse into a “war of all against all”? And if self-preservation is a right we can never truly give up, what does that mean for how far a government can ever go in controlling our lives?

References

1. https://www.litcharts.com/lit/leviathan/themes/nature-war-and-civil-society
2. https://philolibrary.crc.nd.edu/article/the-state-of-nature/
3. https://www.nlnrac.org/earlymodern/hobbes/documents/leviathan.html
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_(Hobbes_book)
5. https://courses.washington.edu/hsteu302/Hobbes%20selections%20(edited).htm
6. https://lewwaller.com/thomas-hobbes-leviathan/
7. https://iep.utm.edu/hobmoral/
8. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Leviathan_(1651)/Chapter_14
9. https://www.bartleby.com/lit-hub/hc/of-man-being-the-first-part-of-leviathan/chapter-xiv-10/
10. https://www.litcharts.com/lit/leviathan/chapter-14-of-the-first-and-second-naturall-lawes-and-of-contracts
11. https://louis.pressbooks.pub/introphilosophy/chapter/thomas-hobbes-on-the-social-contract/
12. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hobbes-moral/