Thomas Hobbes publishes Leviathan and reshapes political theory

Story: 1651 C.E.  |  Last updated: April 1, 1651

In the middle of a civil war that had already cost England a king’s head, a philosopher living in exile in Paris finished a book that would unsettle political thought for centuries. Thomas Hobbes sent Leviathan — its full title running to 21 words — to London printers in 1651 C.E., and the world of Leviathan Hobbes created on the page has never fully left us.

Key facts about the work

• Leviathan Hobbes: Published in London in 1651 C.E., the book’s full title is Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil — a social and political treatise Hobbes revised in a Latin edition in 1668 C.E.
• Social contract theory: Scholars regard Leviathan as one of the earliest and most influential examples of social contract theory, arguing that legitimate government arises from a pact among individuals who surrender some freedoms to escape the chaos of ungoverned life.
• State of nature: Hobbes described life without government as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” — a phrase that entered the language permanently and set the terms for nearly every political debate that followed.

What Hobbes was responding to

The English Civil War, which ran from 1642 C.E. to 1651 C.E., was not an abstract backdrop. Hobbes had watched Parliament and Crown tear the country apart. He had tutored the future Charles II in mathematics while both lived as royalist exiles in Paris. The violence was personal and present.

His response was not an appeal to divine right or tradition. It was an argument built from first principles — from human psychology upward. He began with the body: “Life is but a motion of limbs.” From that materialist premise, he constructed a case that human beings, left without authority, would face endless conflict driven by fear, competition, and the absence of any shared standard of good and evil.

What made this radical was not the conclusion — that strong government is necessary — but the reasoning. Hobbes stripped away God’s mandate, ancestral right, and natural hierarchy. Government was legitimate because rational people would choose it, not because Heaven ordained it.

The book that shocked everyone

Almost no one was satisfied by Leviathan. The Catholic Church and royalist exiles in Paris were outraged that Hobbes subordinated church authority to the sovereign. English parliamentarians were suspicious of his defense of absolute power. Later republican thinkers found his state too total. Even his patron circle grew cold.

The frontispiece — an iconic image in the history of political philosophy — showed a giant sovereign figure whose torso was composed of hundreds of tiny human bodies, all facing inward. Parisian engraver Abraham Bosse created the etching after lengthy discussions with Hobbes himself. The image was not metaphor: it was the argument. The state is made of people, held together by their consent to be governed, and the sovereign embodies that collected will.

The name Leviathan came from the Hebrew Bible — the sea monster of chaos in the Book of Job. Hobbes chose it deliberately, inverting the symbol. The Leviathan of scripture was a force of destruction beyond human control. Hobbes’s Leviathan was the only thing that could prevent destruction: a unified, undivided sovereign powerful enough to hold the war of all against all at bay.

Connections across traditions

Hobbes was reading widely across traditions that went well beyond English thought. His materialist view of human nature drew on ancient Greek atomists, particularly Epicurus, whose school held that the world — including the mind — was composed of matter in motion. Islamic political philosophers writing centuries earlier, including Ibn Khaldun in 14th-century C.E. North Africa, had already developed sophisticated accounts of how societies hold together through shared bonds of solidarity and how they collapse without them. Hobbes was working within a European empiricist tradition, but the underlying questions — what holds human communities together, what makes authority legitimate — were ancient and universal.

It is also worth noting that Leviathan was written in English rather than Latin at a moment when vernacular publishing was democratizing access to philosophy. The expansion of print culture across 17th-century C.E. Europe meant that ideas like Hobbes’s could reach merchants, lawyers, and clergy who had no Latin — audiences that would, within decades, help drive the revolutions that his work helped inspire and that his work had explicitly warned against.

Lasting impact

Leviathan did not just influence political philosophy — it helped define it as a discipline. Social contract theory, which Hobbes launched in its modern form, became the common language through which Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Rawls built their competing visions of legitimate government. Every liberal democracy that grounds its authority in the consent of the governed — rather than divine right or inherited power — is downstream of the argument Hobbes made in 1651 C.E.

The separation of church and state, a cornerstone of modern secular governance, owes something to Hobbes’s insistence that the sovereign, not the clergy, must hold final authority. This was explosive in 1651 C.E. Over the following century, it became common sense.

His materialist account of human psychology also pointed toward what would eventually become modern social science — the attempt to explain human behavior without appealing to supernatural causes. In that sense, Leviathan sits at the headwaters of sociology, political science, and the secular study of ethics.

Blindspots and limits

Hobbes’s framework was built almost entirely around property-owning men in European societies, and his absolute sovereign left little room for the rights of dissent, minority communities, or colonial subjects — a tension that later thinkers, including those drawing on Indigenous and non-Western traditions of governance, would expose forcefully. His insistence that the only alternative to total authority was total chaos was contested in his own century and remains contested now. The question of how much power a sovereign may legitimately hold is, if anything, more urgent today than it was in 1651 C.E.

Read more

For more on this story, see: Wikipedia — Leviathan (Hobbes book)

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