Thomas Hobbes Leviathan

Ten years’ worth of massacred soldiers’ blood drained into the Aegean Sea after succumbing to the atrocities of the Trojan War to settle the dispute between Paris and Menelaus over Helen. Comparably, more than half a million lives were lost to the succession of the North from the Union in the American Civil War over a people’s greed to retain slaves. These two instances, however, differentiate in that the former was a conflict between two nation-states and the latter was within a society in and of itself. The fuel that powered these two engines of violence and disharmony is due to humanity’s inherent self-centered ways. In the Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes stipulates that in order to achieve and maintain civil peace, an individual must use his or

That is, the war of all against all, the natural state of human nature, does not necessarily mean an actual war but the disposition of all individuals to compete for every and anything desired or needed in order to survive 74 (Hobbes I.12.1-5). The state of nature also implies the lack of a sovereign or at least a non-functioning sovereignty. Therefore, in a Leviathan society, Hobbes implores all to submit to a sovereign so that its subjects no longer live in a state of nature. An unsuccessful sovereignty leads to civil war, and can potentially bring the commonwealth, moving back the state of nature. Hobbes also sets forth the idea that out of aristocracies, democracies, and monarchies, the latter one is the best type of commonwealth, instituted through agreement or acquisitioned by force (Hobbes II.18.1, II.20.1). According to Hobbes, The motivation behind the institutionalization of the sovereign in a Leviathan society is fear, the fear “which maketh such a covenant invalid, must be always something arising after the covenant made (as some new fact or other sign of the will not to perform) else it cannot make the covenant void” (85). The same fear of going back to the State of Nature that compromises the citizens’ selfish but valid right to