Hobbes' Leviathan
Government is justified as a contract to escape a war of all against all.
- When
- Known to
- ± 1 year
- Era
- Early Modern, Holocene
Writing in exile during the civil war, Hobbes argues in 1651 that without a common power life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, and that rational individuals would therefore agree to surrender their liberty to a sovereign. The conclusion is authoritarian, but the method is not: legitimacy is derived from the consent of individuals rather than from God or tradition, which is the premise every later liberal argument uses against him.