Leviathan

Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes, gives the social contract a form that turns an agreement among individuals into a justification for absolute government. Its lasting importance in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s account is therefore double-edged: Hobbes offers a powerful, rigorous explanation of political authority, yet makes the people surrender the sovereignty that Rousseau’s theory would keep inalienable.

The Contract and Its Sovereign

In the account discussed here, Hobbes accepts that the original contract is made among the individuals composing the State, not between the people and the government. But the individuals agree not only to form a political community; they also invest a particular person or group with its government. Once established, that government becomes sovereign. The people’s original supremacy is surrendered by the very act that creates political order.

This differs from the popular-contract tradition, in which the agreement among individuals implies that the people remain sovereign and that rulers exercise only delegated power. Hobbes instead holds that the people alienate their sovereignty wholly and for ever. The contract consequently leaves no continuing claim to popular rule: the people owe passive obedience to their ruler whether he governs well or badly.

The distinction between who makes the contract and who receives its authority is central to Hobbes’s argument. Because the government is not a party to the agreement, it does not assume contractual obligations to the people. It can therefore exercise the rights conferred on it without being answerable to its subjects under the contract. The result is more than a powerful state: it is a determinate authority with an unrestricted right to enforce its power.

Order, Obedience, and Despotism

Hobbes’s political reasoning is shaped, in the account presented, by his experience of civil war. He considers even the worst government preferable to anarchy and accordingly seeks arguments that can sustain absolutism. His system binds subjects to obey the ruler rather than preserve a right to resist whenever government fails them.

That insistence on order gives the theory its severe logic. If political authority is created to prevent disorder, a sovereign whose power can be challenged by each subject risks reopening the conflict the State was meant to end. Yet the same logic places the people at the ruler’s mercy: they have surrendered their rights and cannot use the contract to hold government to account. The critic’s assessment is that Hobbes’s theory is not merely statism but pure despotism, since it combines the State’s unbounded rights against individuals with an established authority able to enforce them.

The argument also depends on the possibility of alienating liberty beyond one’s own life. If an individual can surrender not only his own freedom but that of his descendants, a people can likewise bind itself and those who come after it. The account identifies this intergenerational surrender as a point at which both John Locke and Rousseau attack Hobbes’s position.

Contrast with Rousseau and Locke

Rousseau’s objection begins from the consequences of Hobbes’s contract. A people that gives up sovereignty permanently cannot remain the author of its laws or reclaim its political freedom when rulers abuse their power. Rousseau’s own social compact, by contrast, is founded on the total association of each member with the community, not on the people’s permanent transfer of sovereignty to a ruler. In his formulation, the common force is to protect each associate while allowing each, in joining with all, to obey himself alone and remain free.

The contrast also clarifies why Hobbes’s government stands outside its contract. An earlier theory of a contract between ruler and people had served as a popular appeal against royal aggression, since it implied mutual obligations and constitutional limits on the ruler. Hobbes cannot make government sovereign through that arrangement while also leaving it bound by the agreement. He therefore places government beyond the contract’s obligations, making it absolute and irresponsible rather than contractually accountable.

Locke challenges the same claim that political authority can be permanently alienated. He makes government depend on the consent of the governed not only at its institution but throughout its continuance, and holds rulers liable to displacement if they govern tyrannically. The account nevertheless distinguishes Locke’s position from Rousseau’s: Locke offers no machinery short of revolution for expressing popular opinion, and his notion of consent often appears tacit or assumed. Rousseau, by comparison, states the popular-contract theory in its purest and most logical form.

The Book’s Wider Political Significance

Leviathan stands within a tradition of contract arguments that could support sharply opposed political conclusions. The social-contract theory proper treats society as originating in agreement among its members; its natural implication is popular sovereignty. Hobbes accepts the agreement among individuals but changes its destination: rather than preserving the people as sovereign, it authorizes a ruler whose power the people cannot reclaim. The same contractual starting point thus supports both popular authority and absolute obedience, depending on what the agreement is taken to transfer.

The contrast reaches beyond the design of government to the meaning of liberty. Rousseau’s account distinguishes the unlimited reach of natural liberty from civil liberty, which is bounded by the general will, and treats obedience to a law prescribed by oneself as a form of moral freedom. Hobbes’s permanent alienation of sovereignty points in the opposite direction: obedience is owed to an authority the people no longer control. Leviathan is therefore both a major source for Rousseau’s political reasoning and the clearest counterexample to the popular sovereignty Rousseau seeks to establish.