Education Quote by Thomas Hobbes

A clean provocation disguised as common sense: Hobbes strips law of its halo and pins it to power. “Not wisdom but Authority” is doing double duty. It’s descriptive (how law actually functions) and preventive (stop expecting moral truth from legislation). Hobbes isn’t praising stupidity in government; he’s warning that the legal system can’t be grounded in everyone’s competing ideas of the good. If “wisdom” were the source of law, then every citizen could claim superior insight and treat obedience as optional. For Hobbes, that’s not enlightened pluralism; it’s the on-ramp to civil war.

The context is the long shadow of England’s political violence and Hobbes’s core thesis in Leviathan: human beings, left to their own devices, don’t gently deliberate their way to peace. They arm up, form factions, and rationalize brutality as virtue. Authority becomes the technology that converts a crowd into a polity. Law, in this framework, isn’t a moral essay; it’s a stabilizing command backed by the credible threat of force.

The subtext is almost modern in its cynicism: legitimacy isn’t the same as truth. A law can be foolish, even cruel, and still be law if it is issued by the recognized sovereign and enforceable. That’s the unsettling clarity. Hobbes trades the comforting fantasy that politics can be solved by better arguments for the harder claim that order requires a final decider. In an era addicted to “policy wonk” optimism, he reminds us that law is not a seminar; it’s a settlement.