Thomas Hobbes

Life and ideas

Thomas Hobbes lived through the English Civil War and wrote Leviathan (1651) to show why people should obey a strong government. He imagined a 'state of nature' with no government, where everyone fears violent death at the hands of everyone else and there is, in his famous words, a war of all against all. To escape it, people make a covenant to give up their power to a sovereign who has the sole power to make laws and to enforce them. Law, for Hobbes, is the command of the sovereign: there can be no unjust law, because justice is created by law, and nobody may resist the sovereign except to save his own life. His theory of law as the command of a sovereign, kept separate from morality, was a major influence on the later positivism of Bentham and Austin, who developed it.