Narrator: Imagine a world with no laws, no police, no government. A world where your neighbor might take your food, your home, or your life, and face no consequences. In this world, every person is driven by their own desires and fears, locked in a constant struggle for survival. Trust is impossible, cooperation is a fantasy, and progress is a dream. This isn't a post-apocalyptic film; it's the natural state of humanity as envisioned by the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes. He argued that without an overarching power to keep us in awe, human life would be a "war of all against all"—a condition he famously described as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

Written during the bloody chaos of the English Civil War, Hobbes’s masterpiece, Leviathan, is his radical and unflinching answer to this terrifying problem. It presents a powerful argument for why human beings must willingly surrender their natural freedom to an absolute authority in order to achieve the one thing they desire most: security.

Narrator: Before constructing his ideal state, Hobbes first deconstructs the human being. He argues that humans are not guided by a divine soul but are complex machines operating on the laws of motion. All our thoughts, he explains, originate from sense experience—external objects pressing on our organs, creating a motion that travels to the brain. Imagination is simply this same motion, fading over time, like the ripples in a pond after a stone is thrown. Even our train of thought isn't random; it's a chain of associations linked by past experiences.

Hobbes illustrates this with a curious anecdote. While in a discussion about the ongoing civil war, a man seemingly out of nowhere asked about the value of a Roman penny. The question appeared random, but Hobbes traced the mental chain reaction: the thought of the war led to the thought of betraying the king, which led to the thought of Christ’s betrayal, which in turn led to the thought of the thirty pieces of silver paid for that treason, sparking the question about the value of an ancient coin. For Hobbes, this proved that our minds operate on a mechanical, cause-and-effect basis.

This human machine is powered by two fundamental drives: appetite (the motion toward something we desire) and aversion (the motion away from something we hate). What we desire, we call "good"; what we hate, we call "evil." These are not universal truths, but purely subjective labels. The ultimate, unending drive, according to Hobbes, is "a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death." We seek power not for its own sake, but as the means to acquire the future goods we desire and to secure what we already have.

When you place these power-seeking machines together in a state of nature, where everyone is roughly equal in strength and intelligence and has a right to everything, the result is inevitable: a state of constant war. Not necessarily constant fighting, but a constant readiness to fight, driven by competition, distrust, and the desire for glory.

Narrator: How do humans escape this miserable condition? Hobbes argues that the same human nature that leads to war also provides the path to peace. Fear of death and the desire for a more comfortable life motivate people to use their reason. Reason, for Hobbes, is not a source of moral truth but a practical tool for calculation. It reveals the "Laws of Nature," which are essentially rules for survival. The first and most fundamental law is to seek peace. The second is that to achieve peace, each person must be willing to lay down their right to all things, provided others are willing to do the same.

This mutual transferring of rights is a contract, or covenant. However, Hobbes famously states, "Covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all." Promises are meaningless in the state of nature because there is no one to enforce them.

The only solution is for everyone in a society to make a covenant with everyone else to give up their right to govern themselves to a single entity—either one man (a monarch) or an assembly of men (a government). This entity, which Hobbes calls the "Leviathan" or the "mortal god," is granted the authority to use the combined strength and resources of all its subjects to maintain peace and security. This is the social contract. It is not a contract between the people and the sovereign, but a contract among the people to create and obey the sovereign.

Narrator: Once the Leviathan is created, its power must be absolute. For Hobbes, a limited or divided government is a recipe for disaster, as it would inevitably lead back to the civil war he so dreaded. The sovereign must have the right to make laws, judge all disputes, command the military, levy taxes, and control all doctrines taught within the commonwealth. These rights are indivisible; to give any of them away is to destroy the sovereign's ability to protect its subjects.

Hobbes makes the radical claim that the sovereign can never be unjust to its subjects. Because the people authorized all the sovereign’s actions when they created it, any act of the sovereign is an act of the people themselves. To complain about the sovereign's actions is to complain about your own. This doesn't mean the sovereign can't be cruel or foolish, but in a technical sense, it cannot be unjust.

Furthermore, subjects owe the sovereign absolute obedience. The biblical story of David and Saul powerfully illustrates this principle. Even though King Saul was unjustly trying to kill him, David had multiple opportunities to kill Saul but refused. He would not "do such an act against my Lord, the anointed of God." For Hobbes, this demonstrated the moral imperative to obey the sovereign, even a flawed one, because the alternative is the chaos of the state of nature. The obligation to obey only ceases when the sovereign can no longer provide the protection for which it was created.

Narrator: In Hobbes's time, the most significant threat to a sovereign's absolute power was religious authority. The claim by popes or bishops that they held a higher, spiritual authority created a dangerous conflict of loyalties, which Hobbes saw as a primary cause of the English Civil War. His solution was simple and brutal: the sovereign must be the head of the church as well as the state. There can only be one ultimate authority.

Hobbes dedicates the final part of Leviathan to dismantling what he calls the "Kingdom of Darkness." This is not a literal hell, but a "confederacy of deceivers" who use false doctrines to extinguish the light of reason and scripture, all to gain power over mankind. He argues that the primary abuse of scripture is the claim that the "kingdom of God" is the present Church. This error, he believed, was used to justify the Pope's power over kings and to extract wealth from the people through practices like selling indulgences.

He also attacks what he sees as pagan relics that have infected Christianity, such as the worship of images and the belief in demons and incorporeal spirits. He tells the story of the righteous King Hezekiah, who discovered the people of Judah were idolatrously burning incense to the brazen serpent Moses had made. Though the object had a holy origin, its misuse had turned it into a tool of darkness. Hezekiah had it smashed to pieces. For Hobbes, this is exactly what a sovereign must do: smash the idols of false philosophy and misinterpretation to free people from the fear and ignorance that allow them to be manipulated.

Narrator: The central, unavoidable takeaway from Leviathan is the stark choice it presents to humanity: we can have the absolute liberty of the state of nature, which leads to a life of fear and violence, or we can have the security of an ordered society, which requires submitting to an absolute sovereign. For Hobbes, the bargain is clear—we must trade liberty for life. His entire political philosophy is built on the mutual relationship between protection and obedience. The sovereign protects, and in return, the subject obeys.

Hobbes’s work remains profoundly challenging because it forces us to confront an uncomfortable question about our own nature. Is his bleak, mechanical view of humanity correct? Are we fundamentally self-interested, power-seeking creatures who can only be kept in line by an overwhelming force? In an age of complex global threats, the debate over the balance between freedom and security is more relevant than ever, forcing us to ask the same question Hobbes did four centuries ago: What price are we truly willing to pay for peace?