Thomas Hobbes

The 17th Century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes is now widely regarded as one of the most extraordinary political philosophers, whose political masterpiece Leviathan rivals in significance the political writings of Plato, Aristotle, Locke, and Kant all in which we’ve discussed in class. Hobbes is famous for his early and elaborate development of what has come to be known as “social contract theory”, the method of justifying political principles or arrangements by appeal to the agreement that would be made among suitably situated rational, free, and equal persons.(WC#1) He is also infamous for having used the social contract method to arrive at the astonishing conclusion that we ought to submit to the authority of an absolute; undivided and unlimited, sovereign power.(WC#3)

Hobbes was very concerned with the problem of how to arrange society in such a way that the individual self-interest of its members was allowed maximum freedom to operate without encroaching on the "rights" of others. He continuously argued that everyone desires what he called "felicity", by which he meant their self interest. The means of obtaining felicity or this “immense happiness” is by the exercise of power. Each man enjoys (or suffers) a perpetual and restless desire for power, because power is the essential requirement for felicity (happiness).(WC#2)

Hobbes claimed that man is not naturally good, but naturally a selfish hedonist. "Of the voluntary acts of every man, the object is some good to himself". As human motives were, in their natural state, guided by unenlightened self-interest, these could, if left unchecked, have highly destructive consequences. Left unrestrained, humans, propelled by their internal mechanics, would crash against each other. Hobbes tried to envision what society would be like in a "state of nature", before any civil state or rule of law. His conclusion was dispiriting: life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish