"A man cannot lay down the right of resisting them that assault him by force, to take away his life"
About this Quote
Hobbes is often caricatured as the patron saint of authoritarianism, but this line is where his supposedly iron-fisted politics quietly hits a biological limit. The social contract can swallow a lot - taxes, obedience, even the bruising indignities of law - but it cannot digest the most primal fact of all: people will not, and cannot, sign away the right to fight back when someone comes to kill them.
The intent is surgical. Hobbes is drawing a boundary around consent, insisting that covenant has a floor. You can authorize a sovereign to punish you, you can accept courts and prisons, but you cannot coherently authorize your own annihilation at the hands of an attacker, because the impulse to self-preserve is not a preference; it is the engine of politics itself. The subtext is a rebuke to any theory that treats obedience as pure moral duty. For Hobbes, duty is conditional: it rides on the sovereign's ability to protect. When protection collapses into lethal threat, the contract snaps back to the raw "state of nature" logic it was meant to escape.
Context matters: Hobbes is writing in the shadow of English civil war, when authority and violence were indistinguishable on the ground. This sentence functions like an escape hatch built into absolutism. It preserves his bigger argument for strong centralized power while admitting the most destabilizing truth imaginable: even the Leviathan cannot make you rationally promise to die without resisting. That concession is not sentimental; it is Hobbes's hard-eyed realism about what humans will actually do when the blade comes down.
The intent is surgical. Hobbes is drawing a boundary around consent, insisting that covenant has a floor. You can authorize a sovereign to punish you, you can accept courts and prisons, but you cannot coherently authorize your own annihilation at the hands of an attacker, because the impulse to self-preserve is not a preference; it is the engine of politics itself. The subtext is a rebuke to any theory that treats obedience as pure moral duty. For Hobbes, duty is conditional: it rides on the sovereign's ability to protect. When protection collapses into lethal threat, the contract snaps back to the raw "state of nature" logic it was meant to escape.
Context matters: Hobbes is writing in the shadow of English civil war, when authority and violence were indistinguishable on the ground. This sentence functions like an escape hatch built into absolutism. It preserves his bigger argument for strong centralized power while admitting the most destabilizing truth imaginable: even the Leviathan cannot make you rationally promise to die without resisting. That concession is not sentimental; it is Hobbes's hard-eyed realism about what humans will actually do when the blade comes down.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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