QuestionsWhat is a just society?The contract and the absolute sovereign
What is a just society?The contract

The contract and the absolute sovereign

Thomas Hobbes 1588 · 1679Without a state, life would be solitary, brutish and short.
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What it claims

To escape war, people must institute, by a covenant of each with each, a sovereign (a man or an assembly) with absolute, undivided power.

Why

Promises without the sword are mere words, and a limited power sends every dispute back to force: we need an absolute sovereign.

In short

"The contract and the absolute sovereign" is an argument by Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, ch. 17 and 18) on the question "What is a just society?" (answer: the contract). Its claim: To escape war, people must institute, by a covenant of each with each, a sovereign (a man or an assembly) with absolute, undivided power. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 5 objections, 3 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Leviathan, ch. 17 and 18
Valid with an implicit premise

To escape the war of all against all, each says to each: "I authorise this man, or this assembly, and give up my right of governing myself to him, on condition that you do the same." So the Leviathan is born, that "mortal god". Why must its power be absolute? Because, for Hobbes, every other solution leads back to war.

P1Without a common power to keep them in awe, people are at war, even if they have promised each other peace: covenants without the sword are but words.
P2A power that was not absolute but limited by conditions settles nothing: if people dispute whether it has broken those conditions, no judge stands above it. The dispute returns to the sword, and each takes back the right to protect himself by his own strength.
P3The worst inconveniences of an unlimited power are scarcely felt compared with the miseries and horrible calamities of a civil war.
P4 · implicit premiseIf refusing absolute power leads to war, and if its evils are smaller than those of war, people seeking peace must institute it: between two evils, one chooses the lesser.
P5The only way to institute such a power is for each, by covenant with each, to confer all his power on one man or one assembly, which reduces all wills to one.
Therefore, to escape war, people must institute, by a covenant of each with each, a sovereign (a man or an assembly) with absolute, undivided power.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a case where refusing absolute power leads to war and that power is the lesser evil, yet nobody institutes it: nothing yet obliges anyone to choose the lesser evil.
With P4, the conclusion follows. P1 and P2 close every door but one: no power means war; a limited power means war again. What remains is absolute power. P4 is the rule of choice Hobbes does not state in these words, but which follows from his first law of nature ("seek peace"). Without it, knowing that absolutism is the lesser evil is not enough to say it must be chosen. The real attacks bear on P2 (is a limited power really unstable?) and on P3 (is absolute power really less dangerous than war?).
Analogy. A match without a referee turns into a brawl. The players appoint a referee. But if every decision can be contested and no one is above him to settle it, we are back to the brawl. Hobbes concludes: we need a referee whose every decision is accepted, even bad ones. His opponents answer: and what if the referee plays for one team?

Objections

5

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Objection anticipated by Hobbes attacks premise 3

The condition of subjects is very miserable: they are exposed to the lusts and irregular passions of whoever has so unlimited a power in his hands.

Hobbes replies
Hobbes
The human condition is never without inconvenience, and the worst evils of any government are scarcely felt beside those of civil war. The sovereign has no interest in weakening his subjects, for his strength is theirs. But each looks at his taxes through multiplying glasses, his passions and self-love, and lacks the prospective glasses that would show from afar the miseries they avert.
Locke 1689 · attacks premise 3

Absolute monarchs are but men. Thinking one is safe under an unlimited power is believing that people carefully protect themselves from polecats and foxes, but think it safety to be devoured by lions. Whoever is exposed to the will of one man commanding a hundred thousand is in a worse condition than in the state of nature.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1689, after the author's death (1679).
The debate goes on (our summary) Hobbes died in 1679, ten years before the Second Treatise was published, and Locke does not address him by name. His general answer is already in Leviathan (previous objection): the lion is less dangerous than the war of all against all. Locke disputes exactly that comparison: civil war is not the only alternative to the despot.
Montesquieu 1748 · attacks premise 2

A limited power is not necessarily unstable. If the power to make laws, the power to execute them and the power to judge are separated, power checks power: no single judge above everything is needed (The Spirit of the Laws, book XI). Since then, many constitutional regimes have lived in peace without an absolute sovereign, which seems to prove him right.

no reply
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
No reply possible: objection raised in 1748, after the author's death (1679).
The debate goes on (our summary) A Hobbesian would answer that in a regime of separated powers there is always a body with the last word (the voting people, a constitution that can be amended): sovereignty has not disappeared, it has changed form. Hobbes had foreseen the case: for him the idea of power divided between King, Lords and Commons had led England into civil war.
Rousseau 1762 · attacks the conclusion

To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man. A pact in which one side gives everything and the other promises nothing is void. People say the despot ensures tranquillity: tranquillity is found also in dungeons; is that enough to make them desirable?

Hobbes replies
Hobbes Hobbes's anticipated reply (Leviathan, 1651)
I do not ask anyone to give up everything. Some rights cannot be transferred: if the sovereign commands a man, even justly condemned, to kill or wound himself or not to resist those who assault him, that man has the liberty to disobey. And the subjects' obligation lasts only as long as the sovereign has the power to protect them.
The debate goes on (our summary) Rousseau would answer that this is very little: Hobbes's subject keeps the right to flee or defend himself, but not to take part in making the laws. And in Hobbes the sovereign himself promises nothing: the covenant is made among the subjects, not with him (Leviathan, 18). For Rousseau, only someone who obeys a law he has given himself is free.
Hume 1748 · attacks premise 5

Almost all existing governments were founded on conquest or usurpation, not on a contract. And we obey out of habit and because it is useful, not because we promised to. (Essay "Of the Original Contract".)

Hobbes replies
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
Hobbes Hobbes's anticipated reply (Leviathan, 1651)
I know it: beside the commonwealth by institution there is the commonwealth by acquisition, founded by force. But even there, it is not the victory that gives the right of dominion over the vanquished, but his own covenant: he is obliged, not because he is beaten, but because he submits to the victor. A covenant made from fear is still valid, otherwise no one, in any commonwealth, would be obliged to obey. And the sovereign's rights are the same in both cases.
The debate goes on (our summary) Hume would answer that a "promise" extorted by fear of the conqueror is no longer real consent. Above all, Hobbes does not answer his second criticism: if we keep promises because it is useful to society, then obedience rests directly on that utility, and the contract becomes unnecessary to explain it.