During the Reformation, conceptions of secular authority and obedience underwent profound transformation. Martin Luther’s early position emphasized absolute obedience to rulers as divinely ordained. However, this stance evolved, especially in response to political and theological crises. Over time, it led to the idea that rulers who violated divine or natural law lost their legitimacy. Among Calvinists, this shift was even more pronounced. Resistance to unjust rulers came to be seen not just as a right, but as a religious duty.
Over time, these debates gradually moved from a theological to a more secular and legal framework. By the 17th century, thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke began reinterpreting earlier ideas. They developed new political theories based on natural rights and the concept of a social contract.
In Leviathan (1651), Hobbes presents the state not as a divine institution, but as an artificial construct—an entity created by individuals through a mutual agreement to ensure peace and security. This marked a radical departure from traditional, theologically based political theories and laid the foundation for modern political philosophy.
Social contract
Last time, we explored Hobbes’s ethics and his materialist view of human nature: people are guided by natural instincts, seeking what brings pleasure and avoiding what causes pain. Building on this understanding, Hobbes turns to a crucial question—how and why do people create a state? What was the world like before government, and why was it so intolerable that people chose to give up certain freedoms to escape it?
Hobbes was among the first to offer a full theory of the social contract—the idea that human beings once lived without political authority, and later created the state through a mutual agreement. But why was the pre-political condition so problematic? To answer that, we turn to Leviathan, Chapter 13: “Of the Natural Condition of Mankind as Concerning Their Felicity and Misery”:
“Nature hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body and mind; as that though there bee found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind than another… For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by the secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger as himselfe.”
From this natural equality arises mutual distrust. Because people are equally capable of achieving their goals—or of interfering with each other—conflict becomes inevitable. If two individuals desire the same thing, which both cannot possess, they become enemies. Thus, war emerges not from inequality but from equality. Hobbes identifies three main causes of conflict in human nature: competition, distrust, and the thirst for glory.
Furthermore, without a common authority to keep all in check, there can be no stable social life. People experience not pleasure but deep unease in each other’s company, since everyone is a potential threat:
“To this warre of every man against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be Injust. The notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no Law; where is no Law, no Injustice.” (Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, Chapter 13)
However, Hobbes doesn’t believe that people are doomed to endless violence. He also identifies passions that incline humans toward peace:
“The passions that encline man to Peace are Fear of Death; desire of such things as are commodious living; and the Hope by their Industry to obtain them.” (Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, Chapter 13)
From this, we see why individuals would agree to form a social contract—a collective decision to limit their freedom and create a sovereign authority to ensure peace and security.
In Chapter 14, Hobbes introduces a foundational concept:
“The Right of Nature, which Writers commonly call Jus Naturale, is the Liberty each man hath, to use his own power as he will himselfe, for the preservation of his own Nature; that is to say of his own Life.”
Historical Context: The English Civil War
Hobbes lived during the English Civil War, a period of profound upheaval. Some see it as the first modern political revolution, others as the last great religious conflict. This era witnessed the rise of many different political theories. These ranged from staunch royalism to the radical democratic ideas of groups like the Levellers. At the center of the conflict was Parliament’s attempt to limit the king’s power and establish itself as a true legislative authority.Within this spectrum of thought, Hobbes stood firmly on the royalist side.
Yet despite his defense of absolute sovereignty, Hobbes places individual freedom at the center of his political theory. This is what makes his thought particularly relevant to the liberal tradition, even if he himself cannot be called a liberal or proto-liberal. Hobbes’s concept of liberty is strikingly different from both classical republican and later liberal views. This is not the freedom to participate in self-governance or pursue the good life. Instead, it is the raw, negative liberty to act without external restraint in order to survive. To better understand this distinction, we can turn to Quentin Skinner’s account of the republican tradition. He defines freedom as non-domination and argues that true individual liberty can only exist within a free state. Hobbes, by contrast, sees freedom as simply the absence of external constraints—something that, in theory, an absolute ruler could protect just as well as a democratic government.
The next major social contract thinker, John Locke, will move decisively in another direction. For Locke, the state of nature is not a state of war. Instead, it is a condition of relative peace and cooperation. The purpose of the social contract, then, is to secure liberty rather than to suppress it. Although both Hobbes and Locke speak of a “contract,” they imagine very different foundations for political order—and for the meaning of individual freedom.
Hobbes was a royalist and spent part of his life in Paris among other royalist exiles. So no, we wouldn’t call him a liberal in the conventional sense. Still, what keeps the question of Hobbes and liberalism relevant is the striking importance he gives to individual freedom. To explore this further, we can turn to Quentin Skinner’s interpretation of republican theory. Skinner argues that liberalism rose to dominance by replacing an earlier, republican idea of freedom. But what exactly was that idea?
Eventually, liberalism won the ideological battle, and the neo-Roman view of freedom gradually receded. Classical liberalism became dominant in Anglophone political philosophy and has largely retained its influence. According to Skinner, neo-Roman thinkers were often criticized for emphasizing civic freedom at the expense of individual liberty. However, Skinner argues that this critique is misplaced. In his view, republican theorists focused on political liberty precisely because they saw it as the necessary condition for individual freedom.
Their central claim is that liberty requires living under laws made by a free people, not subject to arbitrary power. As Skinner puts it, one can only be free if one lives in a free state (Liberty Before Liberalism, p. 58). The term obnoxious originally described someone entirely dependent on another’s will, and republican thinkers used this concept to argue that living under monarchy or oligarchy resembled a form of servitude—life without political independence or security.
Skinner also notes that while the republican tradition developed a powerful conception of freedom as non-domination, it tended to limit this analysis to public, political life.
Hobbes, in contrast, starts with the idea of individual liberty in the state of nature—where everyone can do whatever they believe is necessary for their survival. But this condition quickly leads to chaos: the war of all against all. To escape it, people agree to limit their own liberty and create a sovereign power that can maintain order. Unlike republican thinkers, Hobbes doesn’t believe dependence on a ruler necessarily undermines freedom. For him, absolute power can provide the security needed for peace and stability.
In Hobbes’s view, what matters is not who makes the laws, but how many laws there are and how strictly they limit your actions. In theory, an absolute monarch could allow more personal freedom than a democracy—if they chose not to impose too many rules. The republican tradition begins with the collective: freedom comes from living in a free society. Hobbes’s version of liberalism, on the other hand, starts with the individual: freedom is the absence of external interference. The real question is this: does individual liberty arise from and depend on the collective freedom of the people? Or is it something each person possesses naturally, regardless of the political system they live under?
Hobbes forces us to reconsider the roots of our political freedom. Is liberty something granted by a free society, or is it something we possess even in the absence of political authority? By grounding the state in fear and self-preservation, Hobbes may not offer a liberal utopia—but he does lay bare the individualistic logic that continues to shape modern politics.
Portrait of Thomas Hobbes by John Michael Wright, circa 1669–1670.
This image is in the public domain and free for use.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
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