WorkThomas Hobbes

The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic

This treatise for the king's side passed from hand to hand in 1640, sent its author into eleven years of exile, and was not printed for ten years.

by Thomas Hobbes272 passages held

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1650(aged 62)
Original language: English

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Overview

On 9 May 1640, days after Charles I dissolved the Short Parliament, Thomas Hobbes signed the dedication of a treatise written in English and addressed to William Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle. The country was quarrelling over how far a king's power reached, and Hobbes meant to settle the quarrel in the king's favour by reasoning from human nature instead of from precedent. The treatise begins with people as they are: creatures of sense, imagination and passion, close enough to equal in strength that anyone can kill anyone. Without a common power over them, each has a right to everything and therefore security in nothing, and their condition is war. Reason tells them to seek peace, but a promise holds only where someone can enforce it. The later chapters draw the conclusion. People escape war by handing their right to govern themselves to one man or one assembly, and that sovereign power cannot be limited, divided between a king and a parliament, or lawfully resisted, because any limit returns the final decision to private judgment and the war begins again. The treatise was not printed but circulated in manuscript copies. When the Long Parliament met in November, Hobbes judged that those copies had put him in danger and left for Paris, where he stayed eleven years; he later claimed to have been the first of all who fled. He recast the argument in Latin as De Cive in 1642 and in English as Leviathan in 1651. In 1650 the original treatise was printed as two books, Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, probably without his permission. It existed in print only as those two books until 1889, when the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies reassembled the text from the manuscripts and published it whole.

Key concepts

What is a “conception” in The Elements of Law?

A conception is any image or thought in the mind, and Hobbes holds that it is a motion in the head set off by an outside object. Sense is that motion while the object is present; imagination is the same motion fading afterwards. His evidence is ordinary: a blow to the eye makes a person see light where there is none, so light as we see it is an appearance of motion.

What does Hobbes mean by “glory” and “vain glory”?

Glory is the inner triumph of imagining one’s own power to be greater than a rival’s. When it rests on real past actions it gives confidence. When it rests on flattery or daydreams Hobbes calls it vain glory, and he reads Don Quixote’s madness as vain glory raised by reading romances. Most passions in the book are defined by this comparison of power, which is why he can sum them up as a race.

What is a “covenant”, and how does it differ from a contract?

A covenant is the promise inside a contract in which one side performs first and trusts the other to perform later. A plain contract exchanges things on the spot, while a covenant binds the future. Hobbes argues that such trust is unsafe wherever nobody can compel the second party. Covenants of mutual trust therefore hold securely only once a common power exists to enforce them.

What is a “body politic”?

A body politic is a multitude of people united as one person by a common power, for their peace, defence and benefit. Hobbes calls the uniting act union: each member includes his own will in the will of one man or one council by agreeing not to resist its commands. The Greeks, he notes, called the result a city. Until that union is made there is only a crowd of separate wills.

What does Hobbes mean by a “law of nature”?

A law of nature is a rule that reason gives to anyone who wants to stay alive among others: seek peace where it can be had, keep covenants, allow others the equality one claims. Hobbes denies that such laws rest on the agreement of nations or of the wise. Reason, he says, is no less part of human nature than passion, and it is the same in everyone.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The Passions and the Race of Life

What moves a human being before any law tells them what to do? Hobbes answers with a body that senses, remembers and desires, and the politics of the second half depends on the answer.

Every thought begins, on this account, as a motion that an outside object sets going in the head; colour and sound are how that motion appears to us, and are not in the things. Passions are the same motion continued toward what pleases or away from what hurts. Hobbes defines them one after another by a single measure, the sense of one’s own power beside another’s: glory, pity, laughter, even love. He closes the list by comparing life to a race with no prize but being foremost. Because desire never ends, he denies that there is any final contentment.

passions
desire
fear
emotion
human nature
perception
imagination
language
knowledge
reasoning

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Why Sovereignty Cannot Be Divided

Can the power to govern be shared between a king and an assembly? In the spring of 1640 that was England’s quarrel, and Hobbes argues that every division hands the last word back to private judgment.

People are equal enough that anyone can kill anyone, and by nature each has a right to everything, which is worth no more than a right to nothing. Reason advises peace, but promises hold only where a common power enforces them. So many wills must be joined in the will of one man or one council. Hobbes then tests the alternatives. A mixed monarchy, with lawmaking in one place and command in another, is a confusion about whom one has obeyed. Appeals to private conscience give rebellion its pretence of right. And an assembly is ruled by its best speakers.

sovereignty
political authority
natural law
equality
self-preservation
covenant
consent
political obligation
obedience
conscience
rebellion
monarchy
aristocracy
peace

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Within this work

passages held: 272
distinct concepts: 410
by passages held, corpus-wide: #275

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “political authority” and “sovereignty”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 14 pairings. 91 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
political authority	sovereignty	15
political obligation	sovereignty	13
natural law	sovereignty	7
knowledge	language	5
covenant	sovereignty	4
covenant	natural law	3
covenant	political obligation	3
knowledge	perception	3
natural law	political authority	3
covenant	political authority	2
language	perception	2
natural law	political obligation	2
political authority	political obligation	2
language	sovereignty	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1642 Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society (De Cive)
Written in Latin for readers across Europe, this is the second of Hobbes's three statements of his political theory, after The Elements of Law and before Leviathan, and the one that forms a section of his larger system.
EN
1650 The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic you are here EN
1651 Leviathan
The last of Hobbes's three statements of his political theory and the one that is still read: it repeats the argument of The Elements of Law and De Cive and says far more about religion than either.
EN
1655 Elements of Philosophy: Concerning Body (De Corpore)
This is the opening section of Hobbes's Elements of Philosophy, where he sets out his logic and his theory of motion. He drafted it over ten years or more, and it reached print only in 1655, thirteen years after the section on the citizen.
EN
1656 The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance
This is Hobbes's fullest treatment of free will and his last word on it in his argument with John Bramhall, an argument that reached print in four instalments between 1654 and 1658.
EN
1682 An Answer to Bishop Bramhall’s The Catching of the Leviathan, with An Historical Narration Concerning Heresy
Two defensive pieces from the late 1660s, when Hobbes was barred from publishing on religion: one closes his quarrel with John Bramhall, which had begun over free will, and the other is his history of how heresy came to be punished.
EN

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