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PHI173: Justice and Society Spring 2019 Lehman College Online Hobbes – Leviathan Hobbes’s Leviathan is one fo the most influential texts in not just philosophy but also political science, history, sociology, and so on. The long text provides an account to explain the necessitation of people to have a governing power over them in order to maintain order and safety. Hobbes proposes that without a government, people would live in a constant state of war, fear, and danger: the state of nature. In the state of nature, people act like animals where we try only to sustain ourselves and defend ourselves against possible attackers. Please note that while this concept may seem foreign to us and implausible given the complexity of our existing societies and their histories for centuries, we do know scientifically that this was the case for the human species for the vast majority of its existence. Before developing into complex Homo Sapiens, other types of the genus Homo did live in a more animalistic manner. As humans developed biologically, so did our sociability and need for community and structure. Since humans are vulnerable in a state of nature and are in a constant anxiety, we are driven to find a way to protect ourselves. In order to do this, we surrender our individual and personal freedom to a sovereign — a leader, ruler, greater power. In giving up our individual freedom and power, we become equal to everyone else, and the sovereign (again, leader, but also in complex political societies, the government and all that it mandates and demands). In the text, he gives this power the name Leviathan. His description of Leviathan is aggressive, grand, and almost beast-like. This power is terrifying and more powerful than anything else. While the depiction in the text is extreme and personified, we ought to recognize that the magnitude of the power that all people surrender their true and absolute independence to is more powerful and great than we are able to comprehend. Can any of us really wrap our minds around the utter power and control that governments have over us? Think of the American government: it controls the justice system and can put people in jail or even impose capital punishment; it controls the information that children are taught in schools and internalize to take as true the rest of their lives; the control the food we have access to; they control where we can go and when; they control when and where we can build shelter; they impose taxes an use our resources in order to build the society around us. By living in a society, each individual (citizen) tacitly consents from the moment they are born to surrender their absolute natural freedom to the sovereign. This is the case in any organized society. This sustains the sovereign’s power over all of the individuals who choose to continue to live in the society (and because of the power of different sovereigns, it makes moving from one place to another extremely difficult and often impossible).