The Leviathan Contract

The contract and its terms

In the state of nature, each person has a natural right to everything, including other people's bodies and lives, if survival demands it. This right is useless because everyone else has it equally. The result is the war of all against all.

The contract Hobbes describes is a way out. Each person agrees with every other person to surrender their natural right to self-governance to a sovereign, an individual or assembly that will make and enforce law. The sovereign is not a party to the contract. The contract is among the people themselves. They authorize the sovereign and commit to obey.

The terms are absolute. The sovereign cannot be held to the contract because the sovereign did not sign it. The sovereign cannot be legitimately resisted, deposed, or punished by subjects. The sovereign can make any law, wage any war, and punish any crime, because all of this is preferable to the state of nature.

Hobbes acknowledged one exception: if the sovereign threatens your life directly, you may resist, because self-preservation is the entire point of the arrangement. But this exception is narrow. It does not extend to protecting others or objecting to unjust policies.

The problem of consent

No one actually signed this contract. It is hypothetical: Hobbes is arguing that rational people would agree to it, not that they did. The question is whether a hypothetical agreement can create real obligations.

Hobbes's answer was that rationality itself generates the obligation. If you reason correctly about your situation, you will see that accepting the sovereign is in your interest. Failing to accept it is therefore a failure of rationality, not merely a defection from an agreement. You are bound by what reason prescribes, even if you never explicitly consented.

This is a strong and contested claim. John Locke replied that only actual consent can create political obligation, and that tacit consent, merely living in a country, is far too thin a basis for the extensive obligations Hobbes described. David Hume went further: practically no one chooses their country, their laws, or the political arrangement they are born into. Consent theories of political obligation face the problem that most people have never had a genuine opportunity to consent or refuse.

Why Hobbes thought a bad sovereign was still better than none

The objection most people have to Hobbes's argument is obvious: what about a sovereign who governs tyrannically? Surely there are cases where rebellion is justified?

Hobbes's reply was empirical, not abstract. The miseries that flow from the dissolution of government, the civil war, the breakdown of production, the return to mutual fear, are in almost all cases worse than the miseries of living under a bad sovereign. A bad sovereign produces injustice for some people. No sovereign produces terror for everyone.

This is a probability argument, not an absolute one. Hobbes is not claiming that every bad sovereign is good. He is claiming that the expected value of maintaining any established sovereign is higher than the expected value of the alternatives, given how quickly the alternative collapses into the state of nature.

The historical record is ambiguous. Civil wars sometimes produce better governments. Revolutions sometimes succeed. But Hobbes wrote during and after the English Civil War, having watched a functioning state dissolve into prolonged and catastrophic violence. His argument is inseparable from that experience.