Justice & Law Quote by Thomas Hobbes

Hobbes is driving a spike through one of the oldest human evasions: I already chose this, so I must keep choosing it. The line is coolly surgical. An error, he implies, doesn’t magically graduate into a private constitution just because you committed to it. Calling it “his own Law” is the tell: Hobbes is mocking the way people dress up stubbornness as principle, turning a mistake into a badge of consistency.

The subtext is political as much as personal. In Hobbes’s world, “law” isn’t a vibe; it’s the machinery that keeps life from collapsing into violent disorder. If every person could declare a self-authored legal reality whenever they blundered, obligation would dissolve. You’d get a society of miniature sovereigns, each insisting that yesterday’s misjudgment binds them today. Hobbes is warning that this logic doesn’t protect dignity; it protects chaos.

The phrasing “nor obliges him to persist” also quietly attacks a common moral excuse: the idea that duty requires sticking with a bad decision. Hobbes refuses that romance of consistency. Rationality, for him, is not theatrical steadfastness but course-correction. Persistence is only a virtue when aimed at something other than error.

Contextually, this fits Hobbes’s larger project in Leviathan: replacing the vanity of self-justification with a hard-edged account of obligation grounded in peace and self-preservation. You don’t earn legitimacy by doubling down. You earn it by abandoning the mistake before it metastasizes into custom, faction, or civil conflict.