We have seen, in the last chapter, what is Hobbes's conception of the 'state of nature,' the condition in which man found himself at the dawn of civilisation, and into which he tends to degenerate when the bonds of political allegiance are gravely relaxed. It is a condition in which the machinery provided by government for the restraint of men's fundamentally anti-social impulses is entirely absent, and in which there is nothing to take its place. How, then, could any number of men ever pass out of this state of anarchy into a state of settled order? Hobbes replies that there is a possibility to escape from the state of nature into one of civil society which is founded partly on men's passions, partly on men's reason. Partly on their passions, since among these there are several which make for peace and orderly existence, such as 'fear of death, desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living, and a hope by their industry to obtain them.' (Leviathan, c. xiii.) Partly on reason, since it is reason which suggests to mankind the proper means of securing gratification for these unbellicose passions, or as Hobbes puts it, 'suggesteth convenient articles of peace upon which men may be drawn to agreement' (Ib.). We might, perhaps, ask how men living by the unregulated promptings of egoistic appetite ever come to listen to these 'suggestions' of reason, but here, too, Hobbes is ready with an answer. We, all of us, he says, have our calmer moments when rational reflection is undisturbed by passion, and it is then that the voice which suggests 'articles of peace' makes itself heard.

Like the great majority of the political theorists from Hooker in the sixteenth century to Rousseau in the eighteenth, Hobbes thus assumes that the transition from savagery to civil society must have began with an express agreement or contract, the so-called 'social compact.' Hence with him, as with the others, it becomes the first object of political theory to discover the terms of this original contract—the 'articles of peace' already mentioned—since it is by these terms that we have to ascertain the limits of the rightful authority of political rulers. The ruler is legitimately entitled to just so much authority over his subjects, and no more, as can be logically deduced from the examination of the terms of the contract by which civil subjection was first instituted. Whatever in the practice of actual rulers is not covered by these terms is usurpation. This method of deducing the rights of a government over its subjects from a supposed original contract, which had, in point of fact, come down to the thinkers of the sixteenth century from the mediæval legists and schoolmen, who were seeking a rational basis for their various theories of the division of power between the Pope and the secular authorities, or between the Pope and the general councils, received its deathblow towards the end of the eighteenth century from Bentham and Burke, both of whom insist, in different ways, that the rights of governments must be based on the actual needs of society, and not on any theory of the primitive rights of man. Bentham's arguments, which will be found in his Fragment on Government, are mainly directed against Blackstone's attempt to determine the rights of the British Crown by deductions from the compact between king and people supposed to be made in the coronation oath, Burke's, against the onslaught of the French Revolution, acting in the name of the 'rights of man' upon the vested interests, which he chooses to regard as established 'rights,' of the nobility and clergy. In the nineteenth century, the growth of historical research into social origins made the conception of government as having arisen at a definite time by means of a definite voluntary compact even more unreal, by revealing the enormous extent to which definite political institutions have arisen out of an earlier stage of 'customary' law. Indeed, when we look the matter squarely in the face, it becomes evident that free association by voluntary agreement belongs to the culmination rather than to the beginnings of civilisation, and that the recognition of the binding force of such agreements presupposes the existence of a highly organised public opinion against their violation, so that contract depends upon society more than society upon contract. It is therefore quite impossible for us to take Hobbes's account of the compact by which savagery is ended and civilised life begun as serious historical fact. Yet it is possible to suspect that the reaction against theories of the origin of government in contract may perhaps have been carried too far even on the historical side. History itself, at least, gives us reason to believe that many a famous community has sprung from combinations of 'broken men,' relics, in a period of general disintegration, from many distinct ruined tribes or cities, who have somehow been thrown together and entered into a new alliance among themselves, and in such cases the new community must clearly have rested upon the voluntary agreement to unite in mutual support. But, in any case, the substance of Hobbes's reasoned plea for absolutism is quite independent of the largely mythical form in which it is clothed by the author. However governments originate, it is at least true that their permanency depends upon the recognition by governors and governed alike of certain general principles defining the functions of the governor and the obligations of the governed, and such recognition may not unsuitably be represented to the imagination as an implicit bargain. These principles Hobbes and the seventeenth century publicists in general call by a name borrowed from the Roman lawyers, who in their turn had borrowed it from the Stoic philosophers, the 'laws of nature,' the curious result of this appeal to the terminology of the Roman jurists being that, in effect, the theorists of the 'social contract' contrive to apply to political institutions of a very un-Roman character the doctrines of the Roman law of corporations. There is, of course, no inconsistency between the phrase 'laws of nature' and Hobbes's doctrine that a law, in the sense of a command by a superior, is impossible until the creation of a public authority to give the command, since Hobbes is careful to explain that 'laws of nature' are not commands, but 'rules of reason,' true universal propositions as to the conditions upon which settled wellbeing is obtainable. They are laws in the sense in which we apply the name to the principle of Excluded Middle or to that of the syllogism, not in the sense in which it is given to the Statute of Mortmain or the British North America Act: 'A law of nature (lex naturalis), is a precept, or general rule found out by reason, by which a man is forbidden to do that which is destructive of his life, or taketh away the means of preserving the same, and to omit that by which he thinketh it may best be preserved' (Leviathan, c. xiv.). Hobbes's employment of the word 'forbidden' in this sentence is, of course, metaphorical. His meaning is simply that since every man desires to live, reflection shows us that it would be irrational to endanger our lives or to fail to protect them. It is in this, and not in any mere idealistic sense, that we have to understand the declaration, in the first chapter of the De Corpore Politico, that the law of nature is identical with reason. It is not that reason is thought of as supplying us with ends of action: the ends of action are already given by the fundamental brute passions and appetites. What reason does is to indicate general rules as to the means by which such foregone ends may be most certainly obtained.

Of such 'general rules found out by reason,' there are, according to Hobbes, a considerable number, but all are deducible from a single supreme rule, 'that every man ought to endeavour peace as far as he has hope of obtaining it, and where he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war. The first branch of which rule containeth the first and fundamental law of nature, which is to seek peace, and follow it; the second the sum of the right of nature, which is, by all means we can to defend ourselves' (Leviathan, c. xiv.). (Of course, by saying that we 'ought' to seek peace, Hobbes means no more than that, in virtue of the hazards and dangers of the 'war of all against all,' it is manifestly to our advantage to do so where we can.) An immediate corollary, which figures as the second law of nature, is that each of us should be willing, when the rest are equally willing, to abandon the general claim to act exactly as he thinks fit, so far as the renunciation is necessary for peace; 'that a man be willing, when others are so too, as far forth as for peace and defence of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things, and be contented with so much liberty against other men as he would allow other men against himself' (Ib.) Briefly, then, the second law is 'do not to others what you are not prepared to allow them to do to you', a precept which Hobbes, characteristically enough, confuses with the 'golden rule' of the Gospel. It is upon this rule that the whole possibility of contract, and, consequently, according to Hobbes, of political society, depends. For what the rule provides for is the laying aside by each member of a body of men of some part of his original right, as described in the first of Hobbes's 'rules of reason,' to act exactly as he thinks fit. Now rights laid aside are either merely renounced, or, when they are resigned for the benefit of an expressly designated person or persons, transferred to that person or persons. Such transference, being a voluntary act, is necessarily interested, since the object of every voluntary act is some good to myself. The contracting parties, then, in every case, act each with a view to his own ultimate advantage. Also, since there are certain things for the surrender of which no man can receive an equivalent, there are things which cannot be made the subjects of contract, rights which cannot be transferred. A man cannot e.g. divest himself of the right to resist an assault upon his life, or an attempt to wound or imprison him. More generally, since the whole object of a transference of rights is to obtain an increased security of life and the means of enjoying life, no act or word of mine can reasonably be interpreted as showing an intention of divesting myself of the means of self-preservation. These considerations will meet us again as furnishing some limits even to the power of the sovereign.

Hobbes now proceeds to deduce from this second law a third, which is the immediate foundation of the rest of his social theory. When two parties make a bargain for their mutual advantage, it frequently happens that one of them is called upon to perform his part of the contract first and to trust the other to discharge his part at some future time. In this case the contract is called, from the point of view of the second party, a covenant. From the second law of nature we can then deduce a third, which Hobbes treats as the foundation of all moral obligation, 'that men perform their covenants made' (Leviathan, c. xv.). This follows, because if I break my agreement with you, then, since your object in the original agreement was to secure some good to yourself, and my failure to perform what I undertook has frustrated that object, you have no longer any inducement to fulfil your part of the bargain. Thus the whole purpose of making covenants has been defeated; 'covenants are in vain, and but empty words, and, the right of all men to all things remaining, we are still in the condition of war' (Ib.). On this law of the sacredness of a covenant depends the distinction of justice from injustice, and, indirectly, the whole of social morality, since 'the definition of injustice is no other than the not performance of covenant. And whatsoever is not unjust is just.' (Ib. Note, incidentally, that Hobbes thus, like Schopenhauer, treats wrongdoing as a concept logically prior to right-doing.) This definition explains what Hobbes had meant by saying that in 'a state of nature' there can be no injustice. Injustice is breach of covenant, but the mutual trust upon which the making of covenants depends, is only possible when there is a coercive power which can affect breaches of covenant with penalties severe enough to make it to my interest to abstain from them, i.e. under a civil government. For the same reason it is only under civil government that there can be property. It is a natural question why, if the motive for loyalty to my agreements is always some prospect of advantage to myself, I should be morally bound to keep them in cases where treachery promises to be still more advantageous. The fact of the obligation Hobbes does not dispute; he even maintains expressly that a promise to a brigand to pay a certain sum on condition of being released is binding unless declared invalid by a properly constituted court of law; but he is not altogether successful in the reasoning by which he supports his view. Partly he replies that a promise-breaker is not likely to gain in the long-run, since no one will trust him after his detection; partly he obscurely hints that there may be a final judgment of God to be reckoned with. Apparently this suggestion is not merely made for the benefit of the orthodox reader but represents a laudable inconsistency in the author's own views, a belief that honesty is not merely the best policy, but has a higher sanctity of its own which Hobbes's analysis of morality fails to account for. Perhaps he was more deeply influenced than he knew by the traditional English hatred of a lie, as something inherently base.

Hobbes now enumerates no less than sixteen subsidiary 'laws of nature,' that is, conditions without which peaceable common existence would be impossible. The general character of these 'laws' is negative; they are prohibitions of various forms of behaviour which may be expected to lead to a breach of the peace, and the deduction, in each case, takes the form of an appeal to self-interest. E.g. if I show myself revengeful, or arrogant, or unwilling to refer a dispute between myself and my neighbour to a disinterested and impartial arbitrator, I am doing what lies in me to prolong the 'state of war,' and am thus losing the increased security of life and enjoyment of its good things which peace would have given me. The whole body of the nineteen 'laws,' Hobbes says, may be summed up in the simple formula which had already been given as an equivalent for the second 'law': 'To leave all men unexcusable, they have been contracted into one easy sum, intelligible even to the meanest capacity, and that is, Do not that to another which thou wouldest not have done to thyself; which sheweth him that he has no more to do in learning the laws of nature, but when, weighing the actions of other men with his own, they seem too heavy, to put them into the other part of the balance and his own into their place, that his own passions and self-love may add nothing to the weight; and then there is none of these laws of nature that will not appear unto him very reasonable' (Leviathan, c. xv.).

We see, then, that Hobbes's 'laws of nature,' looked at as a whole, afford a fair formulation of the fundamental negative condition upon which the maintenance of social order depends; no man is to expect more from his neighbours than he is willing that they should expect from him, and no man is to interfere with the doings of his neighbours in any way in which they may not equally interfere with his. The competitors in the great struggle of life are to start fair, and to 'play the game.' What we should seek in vain in any of Hobbes's expositions of his social doctrine is the great Hellenic conception of the state or community as having a further positive function, a duty to ennoble the lives of its members, so that each of them may, if he will, climb to spiritual heights which he could not have sealed alone. Hobbes can hardly be said to have any real belief in social institutions as the instruments and bearers of progressive civilisation, he treats them as merely so much machinery for the preservation of a status quo. He has mastered only the first half of Aristotle's famous dictum that 'the city comes into being that men may live, but continues to be that they may live well.'

We may now pass at once to a demonstration of the necessity of the organised state and its machinery. The 'laws of nature' are, indeed, in themselves a sufficient code of conduct, and if they were always observed, peaceful social existence would be guaranteed with all its accompanying benefits. But in the 'state of nature' we can have no security that they will be obeyed. They 'oblige in foro interno; that is to say, they bind to a desire they should take place; but in foro externo, that is, to the putting them in act, not always,' since a man who persisted in keeping them while all his neighbours broke them, would infallibly lose by his conduct, and it is impossible, on Hobbes's theory of human nature, that a man should persist in doing what he knows to be contrary to his private interest. Thus they are, rightly speaking, not as yet laws, so long as men remain in a 'state of nature.' For a law means a command given and enforceable by a definite person. 'These dictates of reason men use to call by the name of laws, but improperly; for they are but conclusions or theorems concerning what conduceth to the conservation and defence of themselves, whereas law properly is the word of him that by right hath command over others' (Leviathan, c. xv.). What is needed, then, to secure actual obedience to them is that they should be converted into commands issued by an authority which has rightful claims to obedience, and has also sufficient force at its disposal to secure obedience by the infliction of such penalties for disobedience as may make it always to a man's own advantage to obey. What is needed is, in fact, the institution of a ruler, or sovereign, and with the creation of the ruler we have passed at once into a state of civil society, or political subjection. This is why, with Hobbes, the creation of a ruler or chief magistrate is identical with the creation of society itself, and rebellion against the ruler equivalent to the dissolution of the social bond itself.

Before we go on to examine the way in which the ruler is created, there are two points to which it is essential to call attention if Hobbes is not to be greatly misjudged. In spite of his insistence upon the view that the 'dictates of reason' do not become actual commands until there is some one to enforce them, Hobbes is not justly chargeable with the identification of the moral law with the caprices of an autocrat. The validity of the moral law, though not its character as 'law,' is with him anterior to the establishment of the ruler, and depends upon what he takes to be the demonstrable coincidence of morality with the general interest. What the ruler is needed for is to provide the individual with a standing adequate incentive to behave morally, and Hobbes is at great pains to urge that his favourite constitution, an absolute monarchy, is precisely the form of society in which the ruler is least likely to have any personal interest independent of the well-being of the community, and may therefore be most safely trusted to see that his 'laws' embody nothing but the conditions necessary for peace and security.

And again, though Hobbes's argument amounts to a defence of absolutism, the defence is throughout based on rationalistic and, consequently, democratic grounds. He is entirely free both from the superstition of a 'divine hereditary right' inherent in monarchs, such as the Stuarts laid claim to, and from the doctrine that mere force itself constitutes right. His object is to show that the absolute authority of the sovereign has a foundation in right by tracing it back to its supposed origin in a voluntary 'transference of right' on the part of the subject, a transference made in the interests of the subject himself, and so to legitimate absolutism by giving it a utilitarian basis. The jure divino royalists were thus completely justified in their instinctive distrust of Hobbes. When once it is granted that absolute sovereignty is only defensible if it can be shown to be for the general interest, the door is opened for further inquiry whether absolutism really is for the general interest or not, and, if it can be shown that it is not, for the rejection of absolutism itself. Thus Hobbes's theories really contain the germs of the constitutionalism which he combated. To declare that absolutism requires an utilitarian justification is to be already half-way on the road to revolution; there is much more community of spirit between Hobbes and Locke or Sidney, or even Rousseau, than between Hobbes and Filmer.

The immediate object of Hobbes's deduction of the rights of the sovereign is closely connected with the political controversies of his own time. He is anxious to disprove the claims made by Parliament against the British Crown to be, in a special sense, the representative of the people and of popular rights. He therefore sets himself to argue that, in every society, the supreme executive authority is already itself the true representative of the whole community; the community, consequently, cannot be again 'represented' by any other institution, and all claims made by such institutions to authority co-ordinate with, or superior to, that of the executive, on the plea of their 'representative' character, must be nugatory. To effect this proof, he has recourse to the technical terms of the Roman law of corporations and their legal representation. He starts with the legal definition of a person. A person means any being whose words and acts are considered in law as issuing either from himself or from any other man or thing to whom they are attributed. In the latter case, where the words and acts of such a person are legally regarded as belonging to some other being or beings, whom he represents, the representer is an artificial person (e.g. an advocate, speaking from his brief, is an artificial person, who represents his client; what he says is taken in law as if it were uttered by, and committed, not the advocate himself, but his client). When the being thus represented by another owns the words and acts of his representative, he is said to authorise them, and the representative speaks and acts with authority, so that an act done by authority always means an act 'done by commission or license from him whose right it is.' This at once leads to the conclusion that, by the 'law of nature,' any being who has 'authorised' another to represent him is bound by all engagements entered into by his representative on his behalf, so far as they come within the scope of the authorisation, exactly as if they were his own words or acts. To repudiate them is to be guilty of a breach of the law that covenants when made are to be kept.

This point being granted, it only remains to establish the proposition that all governments must be regarded as originating in a commission bestowed by a whole community upon the government to 'represent' it, and the logical defence of absolutism is complete. Accordingly Hobbes now proceeds to reason as follows. An aggregate of individual men can only become a true society in so far as it exhibits a unity of will and purpose. It is this unity of will which constitutes the multitude into a community. But there is, properly speaking, no such thing as a 'general' will, or will of society at large, which is not that of individuals. Only by a legal fiction can we speak of anything but individual beings as endowed with will. Consequently, the unity of society is only possible by means of representation. The 'will' of the society becomes a real thing when the original aggregate agree to appoint a determinate man, or body of men, their representative, i.e. to take the volitions of that man, or that body of men, as 'authorised' by every individual composing the aggregate.

In this way, and only in this way, an aggregate may, by legal fiction, become one person, i.e. a collective subject of legal rights and duties. 'A multitude of men are made one person when they are by one man, or by one person, represented so that it be done with the consent of every one of that multitude in particular. For it is the unity of the Representer, not the unity of the Represented, that maketh the person one. And it is the Representer that beareth the person, and but one person; and unity cannot otherwise be understood in multitude. And because the multitude naturally is not one but many, they cannot be understood for one, but many, authors of everything their representative saith or doth in their name, every man giving their common representer authority from himself in particular, and owning all the actions the representer doth' (Leviathan, c. xvi.). The only way, then, in which an aggregate of men can form themselves into a society for mutual defence against outsiders, and against one another's anti-social tendencies, is by unanimous agreement to appoint some definite man, or number of men, to act as their representative, whose commands each of the aggregate is henceforth to regard as issuing from himself, and by whose actions each henceforth is to regard himself as bound, exactly as though they had been performed by himself. In this way, the 'laws of nature,' the conditions of peace and security, become actually operative, since by making such an agreement, the represented implicitly authorise their representer to employ their united physical force, as though it were his own, in restraint of all disobedience to his commands, and thus create a coercive power adequate enough to give every individual personal motives to obey.

'The only way to erect such a common power … is to confer all their power and strength upon one man, or upon one assembly of men, that may reduce all their wills, by plurality of voices, unto one will; which is as much as to say, to appoint one man, or assembly of men, to bear their person; and every one to own and acknowledge himself to be the author of whatsoever he that so beareth their person shall act or cause to be acted in those things which concern the common peace and safety, and therein to submit their wills to his will and their judgments to his judgment. This is more than consent or concord; it is a real unity of them all in one and the same person, made by covenant of every man with every man…. This done, the multitude, so united in one person, is called a Commonwealth…. This is the generation of that great Leviathan, or rather, to speak more reverently, of that mortal God, to which we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and defence. For by this authority, given him by every particular man in the Commonwealth, he hath the use of so much power and strength conferred on him, that by terror thereof he is enabled to form the wills of them all to peace at home and mutual aid against their enemies abroad. And in him consisteth the essence of the Commonwealth, which, to define it, is one person, of whose acts a great multitude, by mutual covenants one with another, have made themselves every one the author, to the end that he may use the strength and means of them all as he shall think expedient for their peace and common defence. And he that carrieth this person is called Sovereign and said to have sovereign power, and every one besides, his subject' (Leviathan, c. xvii.).

One or two points in this deduction call, perhaps, for special remark. (1) It should be clear that, in spite of his absolutist leanings, what Hobbes is trying to express by the aid of his legal fictions is the great democratic idea of self-government. The coercive powers of the ruler are only legitimated in his eyes by the thought that they give effect to what is at heart the will of the whole people over whom he rules; the sovereign is, in effect, the incarnation of the national will. But as his philosophy will not allow him to admit the reality of any purpose which is not that of a definite man, he has to conceive of this national spirit and purpose as having no actual existence until it is embodied in a representative of flesh and blood. The nation is one man, with a will and purpose of its own, but it is one only by the legal fiction which treats the acts of an agent or representative as if they were those of that which he represents. To borrow an analogy from the case of the individual, the soul of the great artificial 'body politic' is not diffused over the whole organism, 'all in every part,' but definitely located in a central organ, or brain. This is why Hobbes is so careful to insist that legitimate sovereignty must be based on an express or tacit consent of every member of the subject body, and also why he is afterwards at great pains to argue that his favourite form of government, the absolute sovereignty of a single man, is just the one in which, from the nature of the case, the ruler is least likely to have any private interests of his own distinct from those of the community, and, in fact, is most nearly a mere mouthpiece of the national will.

(2) With Hobbes, as we see, the creation of a commonwealth, and the creation of a central coercive or executive power, form one and the same act. It is by the constitution of an executive that the 'laws of nature,' which bid men to seek peace and ensue it, cease to be amiable but impracticable ideals and become operative realities. He is thus the author of the doctrine, revived in the nineteenth century by Austin and his disciples, that sovereign power is in its nature one and indivisible, and that there can be no real distinction between the different functions of government, so that the making of laws may belong to one set of persons, the enforcing them by penalties to a second, and the interpretation of them in particular cases to a third. It is on this point that Hobbes's political theory is most strikingly at variance with those of his best-known successors. When Locke formulated the philosophy of the Revolution Whigs in his treatises on Civil Government, he was inevitably led, in the attempt to justify resistance to a chief magistrate who violates his trust, to make a distinction which is opposed to the central thought of Hobbes. With Locke the fundamental and original 'social compact' consists simply in the determination of a number of men to live in future under a known and common law of action instead of being guided by the uncertain and fluctuating dictates of individual judgment, i.e. in the will to establish a common legislature. The appointment of a definite set of persons armed with power to put the decisions of this legislature into act—the creation of executive officials—is a later proceeding, and the chief magistrate thus becomes a mere delegate of the legislature, a trustee, who may lawfully be removed whenever he transgresses the limits of the powers delegated to him. Locke is thus the author of the famous doctrine of the 'division of powers' between distinct 'branches' of government, and of the theory of the importance of 'constitutional checks,' by which one 'branch' may be hindered from usurping the functions of the others.

(3) We might perhaps add that in virtue of his definition of the ends of government as exhausted by the preservation of 'peace and common defence,' Hobbes may be regarded as a forerunner of the negative laisser aller doctrine of the functions of the state. The sovereign is there, in fact, to remove certain standing obstacles to the secure prosecution by his subjects of their individual aims, to keep society from relapsing into primitive anarchy. With his defective theory of volition, Hobbes can naturally find no place for any conception of the state as an organisation for the positive promotion among its members of the 'good life' or 'civilisation' or 'progress,' or whatever else we may please to call that ideal of life, by which the rationally free man is distinguished from the barbarian. The very existence of moral and social progress is, in fact, just the one striking feature of historical civilisation which his account of human nature, to be consistent with itself, is bound to ignore.