We're going to be reading some passages from Hobbes's 1651 work Leviathan, on the
origin and nature of political society. One of the first points that we'll see
Hobbes making in these excerpts is that there is no natural political hierarchy
between human beings. Now, let's think about what that means. If you're going to
ask, 'how should society and political life be arranged?', one of the first places
you would look would be at the nature of things, at human nature and the nature of
human society. Perhaps you would find that there are some people who are by
their very nature uniquely suited to rule, and other people who by their very
nature require being ruled. So, to give an example: look at the family, the human
family. Within the family, if I look at the arrangement of the family and the
needs of its members, I discover that some members of a family, specifically
the children, stand in need of guidance and rule from outside, while other
members of the family, specifically the parents, are uniquely able to provide
that guidance and rule. They would provide it to children extensively at
first, and then with more and more freedom given to the children as they
rise toward maturity and the ability to use their reason and function
independently. And therefore I would expect that any rational ordering of the
family would involve the parents ruling over the children and not vice-versa and
not on terms of equality. That's just what the nature of things requires. So I
discover by looking at the nature of the family and its members, I discover a
natural order or hierarchy implicit in the reality of the situation. Is there a
similar hierarchy in terms of human political society? Hobbes argues that
there is not. He insists that human beings are naturally equal, and we are
not going to find any kind of natural basis for a particular form of
government or a particular class of rulers and a particular class of ruled.
In this he differs from Plato, who you may remember
has the three-tiered system in the Ideal City. So the first point to get out
of this excerpt at the beginning is that Hobbes denies any possibility of a
natural hierarchy being the basis of political order. Political order instead
is going to be the product of human invention and human will. It's going to
be a thing that we create, not a thing that we draw out of our nature.
The second important point from the beginning of these excerpts is
the character of the equality that natural human beings possess. It is not
an equal political freedom, an equal freedom to take part in civic government.
It's something much more dangerous and much more primitive. It is, says Hobbes,
an equal vulnerability to violent death at the hands of other people. No matter how different we are in
strength, even the strongest human being must sleep sometime. And when he's asleep
even the weakest human being, a weak man or a woman or even a largish child, can
sneak up on him and smash his head with a rock. Meaning that even the strongest
among us naturally is as vulnerable as anybody else to being murdered in his
sleep, to suffering lethal violence at the hands of other humans. Now, this is
the starting point, the natural starting point, for political order but we also
have one other important asset when we look at man in the state of nature.
We have a rational desire to exit the state of nature. There are many inconveniences
and dangers involved in the state of nature, and being rational creatures
we recognize this and we would naturally want to get out of this
situation. And this is the origin of the social contract. The social contract for
Hobbes is going to be the means by which free, naturally free, individuals create a
sovereign or a government to rule over them and to establish justice among them.
That's where we get standards of justice and injustice and requirements for
obedience and the beginning of political life.