How Did Thomas Hobbes Justify Absolute Monarchy?

2025-08-30 04:39:33 323

3 Answers

Emma
Emma
2025-09-02 23:55:24
I still get a little thrill thinking about how Hobbes justifies putting near-total power in one hand — it’s like watching someone press the big red button in a tense movie and hoping it’ll save everyone. He imagines a pre-political time where people all have natural liberty but also equal vulnerability. Because no one is guaranteed to be better off in that chaos, fear pushes folks to cut a deal: we all agree not to harm one another and we appoint someone to enforce that peace.

What’s clever (and chilling) is his argument that this enforcer — the sovereign — has to be absolute. Hobbes worries that if the sovereign can be constantly challenged or divided, you’re back to factions and bloodshed. So the justification is pragmatic: absolute authority is justified because it’s the quickest path from violent insecurity to stable civil society. I’m the kind of person who watches 'Death Note' and thinks about power ethics, and Hobbes would say the ledger that keeps the streets safe justifies the heavy hand administering it. Critics rightly point out the risk of tyranny and the suppression of dissent, but Hobbes counters that the alternative — return to the state of nature — is far worse. It’s a bitter compromise, and honestly, I can see both why people found it necessary in his era and why many of us bristle at it today.
Liam
Liam
2025-09-03 02:11:32
I've been chewing on Hobbes ever since a late-night reread of 'Leviathan' while a storm rattled the windows — it felt fitting. He kicks off with a brutal but simple imagine-if: humans without a common power to keep them in check. That 'state of nature' is not a romantic wilderness; it's a nasty, solitary, brutal scramble where everyone's basic drive is self-preservation. From my point of view, that's the emotional core of his justification: people are scared of death and chaos, so they rationally agree to trade some freedoms for safety.

Hobbes then builds the idea of a social contract. I like picturing it like players in a chaotic multiplayer match deciding to pause and appoint a moderator who enforces rules so the game doesn’t collapse. We (collectively) give up certain rights to do whatever we want and vest absolute authority in one sovereign who can keep peace. The logic is practical, almost mechanistic: one will has fewer clashes than many competing wills, so an absolute ruler prevents civil war.

He also insists that once this transfer of rights happens, the sovereign’s commands are the law. In my own life, I find that claim unnerving — it prioritizes order over individual liberty in a fairly stark way. But placed in Hobbes' 17th-century context of civil war and terror, his plea for a strong central power reads less like love of monarchy and more like a desperate bet on survival. If you want the philosophical sprint version, think: fear → contract → sovereign power to avoid mutual destruction. If you want to dig deeper, reading 'Leviathan' alongside some modern critiques makes the trade-offs feel more alive and messier than his clean logic suggests.
Ulysses
Ulysses
2025-09-05 10:19:25
Why did Hobbes back absolute monarchy? I tend to think of it like a worst-case management plan. He starts from the premise that in a world without a common authority people live in constant fear and competition, which makes life precarious. The way he fixes that is by imagining a covenant: individuals collectively agree to transfer their rights to a single sovereign who can guarantee peace.

Hobbes’ core claim is practical rather than divine; the sovereign’s power is justified because it prevents the collapse into violent chaos. He also argues that a single, unquestioned authority avoids the fragmentation that fuels civil war — multiple centers of power invite conflict, while one central power can enforce laws uniformly. The price, of course, is limited personal freedom and almost no right to revolt, since rebellion risks returning everyone to the dangerous state of nature. Reading him makes me uneasy and intellectually stimulated at once: his move is a rational calculus driven by fear and survival, but it also raises persistent moral worries about justice, abuse, and whether peace at the cost of liberty is truly humane. I keep coming back to that tension whenever I see fictional rulers portrayed as necessary evils in stories like 'Game of Thrones' or when following tough political debates in real life.
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