Why would anyone give up their freedom to a Leviathan?

Imagine there is no government. No police, no courts, no army, no one whose orders everyone follows. Thomas Hobbes asked what life would be like, and answered in chapter XIII of Leviathan. That answer is why he thought people would hand almost all their freedom to a ruler, and why he thought they would be wise to.

The question matters beyond the exam hall. Arguments about how much power a state should have, from police powers to emergency laws, keep coming back to the one Hobbes started from: what would we fear if there were no state at all?

What is the state of nature?

The state of nature is life with no common power: no person or body that everyone fears and obeys. Hobbes begins with a claim about equality. People are not equal in strength, but they are close enough that no one is safe: “the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest”, by plotting or by joining with others (chapter XIII).

Equal ability, he argues, gives everyone equal hope of getting what they want, and two people who want the same thing become enemies. He finds “three principall causes of quarrell”: competition, for gain; diffidence, his word for distrust, which makes people strike first to be safe; and glory, for reputation. With no one to restrain any of it, he draws his conclusion:

“Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man.” (Leviathan, chapter XIII)

War, for Hobbes, does not mean constant fighting. It means a time when no one can count on not being attacked. In such a time no one farms, builds or trades, because no one can expect to keep what they make. There are no arts, no letters, no society, and worst of all “continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”

The famous line is the end of an argument, not a description of cave-dwellers. Hobbes is asking what each of us would have to do to stay alive if no one held power over all of us. His answer is “whatever it takes”, and that is exactly what makes everyone else afraid.

Why does a promise need a sword?

Because, for Hobbes, a promise that no one can enforce protects no one. In the state of nature each person has the right of nature: the liberty to use their own power, as they judge best, to stay alive (chapter XIV). Reason also gives them laws of nature, rules for staying alive. The first is to seek peace. The second is to give up the right to everything, if others are willing to do the same.

The trouble is the “if”. Whoever keeps their side of a bargain first, with no one to make the other side keep theirs, has handed an advantage to an enemy. So a promise alone does not end the war. Chapter XVII says it in one line:

“And Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.” (chapter XVII)

This is Hobbes's answer to the question in the title. He does not say that people stop wanting freedom. Chapter XVII opens by describing them as people “who naturally love Liberty, and Dominion over others”, and says that what makes them accept restraint is “the foresight of their own preservation”. They give up their freedom because they can see what keeping it would cost.

What is handed over, and to whom?

Each person hands over the right of governing themselves, to a sovereign that is not itself a party to the promise. Hobbes gives the words of the covenant as if each person were saying them to every other:

“I Authorise and give up my Right of Governing my selfe, to this Man, or to this Assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy Right to him, and Authorise all his Actions in like manner.” (chapter XVII)

Three things in that sentence are easy to miss, and an answer that catches them stands out.

1. The promise is between subjects. “I” promise “thou”, my neighbour. Nobody promises anything to the ruler, and the ruler promises nothing. Chapter XVIII spells it out: the sovereign gets its power “by Covenant onely of one to another, and not of him to any of them”. So the sovereign cannot break the covenant, and no subject can claim to be released because it did.
2. The sovereign need not be a king. It is “this Man, or … this Assembly of men”. Hobbes argues for absolute sovereignty, power that nothing in the state can overrule. He does not argue that one person must hold it.
3. Subjects authorise what the sovereign does. Its actions count as their own, which is why, for Hobbes, a subject cannot call them an injury done by someone else (chapter XVIII).

The result is one power made out of everyone's: “This is the Generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather (to speake more reverently) of that Mortall God, to which wee owe under the Immortall God, our peace and defence.”

What does the subject keep?

One thing that cannot be given away: the right to stay alive. Hobbes holds that a promise not to defend yourself against force is void (chapter XIV), because no one can be taken to have given up the very thing the whole bargain was for. In chapter XXI he draws the consequence. If the sovereign commands a man “to kill, wound, or mayme himselfe; … yet hath that man the Liberty to disobey.”

A second limit follows from the first. Obedience is the price of protection, so it ends when protection does:

“The Obligation of Subjects to the Soveraign, is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth, by which he is able to protect them.” (chapter XXI)

Every other liberty, Hobbes says, lies only where the sovereign's laws are silent (chapter XXI), and a subject has no right to overthrow a sovereign that rules badly. But a sovereign that can no longer protect has, by his own logic, stopped being owed obedience. Absolute power, in Leviathan, is still power on a condition.

What did his critics say?

The sharpest objection is that Hobbes cures one danger by creating a bigger one. If the reason to leave the state of nature is fear of other people, why trust one person, or one assembly, with power over everyone and nothing to check it?

John Locke put it as an image in his Second Treatise of Government (1690). Writing against absolute monarchy, he says that to accept it is to be like people who guard against “pole-cats, or foxes” but “think it safety, to be devoured by lions” (chapter VII). For Locke, people keep rights that no government may take, and may resist one that breaks its trust.

Hobbes had answered the objection in advance. He did not claim a sovereign would be good. He claimed that the worst it could do is small next to civil war (chapter XVIII). And he treated limits on the sovereign as a danger in themselves: the opinion that the holder of sovereign power “is subject to the Civill Lawes” is, he says, “repugnant to the nature of a Common-wealth”, and dividing the sovereign's power is on his list of what weakens a state (chapter XXIX).

The disagreement is about which danger is worse: one another, or the ruler. Hobbes fears the first more, Locke the second. An answer does not have to choose between them, but it has to show it knows which fear each one starts from.

Where is the Leviathan in India's Constitution?

India's Constitution creates Hobbes's common power, then does the two things he warned against: it divides that power, and it puts it under law. The common power is there. Police and public order are in the State List, so the States hold them, while defence and the armed forces of the Union are in the Union List.

But the power is divided, between the Union and the States, by Article 246 and the three lists of the Seventh Schedule. And it is limited. Under Article 13(2) the State “shall not make any law which takes away or abridges the rights conferred by” Part III, the fundamental rights, and a law that does is void to that extent. Courts decide when that has happened.

The one liberty Hobbes left every subject, life itself, is the one Article 21 protects: “No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law.” The difference is in how it is protected. Hobbes's subject may defend his own life against the sovereign; India's citizen can take the State to court.

Read this way, the Constitution is neither Hobbes's state nor its opposite. It accepts his first step, that without a common power there is no security, and refuses his second, that the power must be undivided and above the law.