"Not believing in force is the same as not believing in gravitation"
About this Quote
Hobbes lands the line like a dare: if you want to live in political reality, stop pretending power is optional. By pairing "force" with "gravitation", he performs a neat rhetorical swap. Violence and coercion aren’t framed as moral choices but as natural laws, indifferent to our preferences. You can dislike gravity all you want; you still fall. You can condemn force; it still organizes the world.
The subtext is less "might makes right" than "moralizing won’t save you". Hobbes is writing in the shadow of England’s civil wars, when the pieties of divine right and parliamentary virtue both failed to prevent bloodshed. His project in Leviathan is to explain why order requires an authority strong enough to end the war of all against all. In that setting, "not believing" becomes a kind of political childishness: the refusal to see that fear, threat, and enforcement are already doing the work you attribute to shared values.
The intent is also defensive. Hobbes knows "force" sounds ugly, so he launders it through physics: not noble, not wicked, just inevitable. That move pressures the reader into a hard bargain. If coercion is as constant as gravity, the only question is who controls it and under what rules. The state becomes a technology for concentrating force so private violence doesn’t become the default currency of everyday life. Hobbes isn’t celebrating brutality; he’s warning that denying its presence hands the advantage to whoever is most willing to use it.
The subtext is less "might makes right" than "moralizing won’t save you". Hobbes is writing in the shadow of England’s civil wars, when the pieties of divine right and parliamentary virtue both failed to prevent bloodshed. His project in Leviathan is to explain why order requires an authority strong enough to end the war of all against all. In that setting, "not believing" becomes a kind of political childishness: the refusal to see that fear, threat, and enforcement are already doing the work you attribute to shared values.
The intent is also defensive. Hobbes knows "force" sounds ugly, so he launders it through physics: not noble, not wicked, just inevitable. That move pressures the reader into a hard bargain. If coercion is as constant as gravity, the only question is who controls it and under what rules. The state becomes a technology for concentrating force so private violence doesn’t become the default currency of everyday life. Hobbes isn’t celebrating brutality; he’s warning that denying its presence hands the advantage to whoever is most willing to use it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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