Book: The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic

Overview

Thomas Hobbes presents a compact, systematic exposition of human behavior, moral obligation, and political authority grounded in a materialist, mechanistic view of people. He treats social life as arising from the same passions and motions that govern the body, and explains political structures as artificial devices formed to secure peace and preserve life. The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic sets out concise definitions and arguments that anticipate the fuller political theory he later develops.

Human Nature and Passion

Hobbes describes humans as driven by appetite and aversion, with reason serving as a calculating tool to pursue ends framed by those passions. Sensation, imagination, and memory combine to produce desires that push individuals toward what they judge good and away from what they judge ill. Fear of death and the desire for self-preservation are especially powerful motives; they shape judgment and form the basis for rational calculation about safety and advantage.

Reason, Right, and Natural Law

Reason discovers general rules for peaceful coexistence, which Hobbes calls laws of nature. These laws are not commands from a deity but practical precepts that arise from the rational insight that peace is desirable when it secures continued life. The first law is to seek peace and follow it; other laws prescribe the performance of covenants and the equitable distribution of resources necessary for survival. Natural right, by contrast, is unlimited: each person has a liberty to use whatever means she judges necessary for preservation until she binds herself by covenant.

State of Nature and the Social Covenant

Left to their natural rights, people inhabit a condition in which competition, diffidence, and glory produce insecurity and conflict. Hobbes characterizes this natural condition as one where life is precarious and social cooperation is fragile. To escape that insecurity, individuals rationally agree to renounce certain natural liberties and to authorize a common power to enforce compliance. Covenant and consent thus produce political obligation: obedience flows from the transfer of natural rights to an agreed authority or to mutual guarantees.

Sovereignty and the Artificial Person

Political authority, once constituted, becomes the central guarantor of peace and civil justice. Hobbes insists that the sovereign must possess sufficient unity and power to prevent a return to disorder; divided or constrained authority invites faction and collapse. The sovereign acts as an "artificial person, " embodying the collective will and possessing the prerogatives needed to secure common safety. Subjects retain only those liberties expressly preserved by the covenant or conceded by the sovereign.

Law, Justice, and Civil Society

Civil law and justice, for Hobbes, are products of the sovereign's decisions and the social contract that founds sovereignty. Justice consists in keeping valid covenants; what counts as right and wrong in civil life is determined by the laws and institutions that the common power enforces. Morality thus becomes tightly connected to civil order: virtues are prized insofar as they support peace and the stability of association.

Significance and Influence

The Elements frames political thought in concise, accessible terms and lays philosophical groundwork for later modern political theory. Its stress on self-preservation, contractual foundation for authority, and the necessity of a strong public power influenced subsequent debates about state legitimacy, rights, and the limits of resistance. The piece continues to be read as an early, rigorous articulation of why centralized authority emerges from natural human motives and how political obligation can be justified by mutual agreements.