by Martin Reftorr

Created on: June 15, 2008   Last Updated: June 16, 2008

Enlightenment: Hobbes' Leviathan

As one of the many significant philosophes of the Enlightenment era, Thomas Hobbes examined a variety of subjects with a high intellectual interest and contributed a great deal of knowledge toward the advancement of those fields. Among his most influential literary works is Leviathan, a book asserting for political change on the basis of a "social contract" between men and an established government. Hobbes' Leviathan reflects the ideals of the Enlightenment entirely in that it attempted to utilize human reason to combat injustices and domination of society by a tyranny or a hereditary aristocracy.

Leviathan represents one of the earliest illustrations of a "social contract" between government and men. As an Enlightened writer, Hobbes believed that grounded in human reason was the necessity to create an order preventing conflict between men in a so-called "war of all against all" in that would ensue in an unenlightened "state of nature". Along with the Enlightenment's ideal of natural rights, Hobbes also believed that protection of rights arise out of need, but not by the principle of war. In fact, Hobbes believed war was irrational to the human condition and that men would be better off by agreeing to a social contract and submitting to an authority with well-outlined powers. In this arrangement, people could ensure protection of their rights while maintaining peace and cooperation with those around them. Although Hobbes argued for an absolute authority, he, like other Enlightenment thinkers, had faith in human rationality than the leader of the government would act in the interest of protecting natural rights for all men so as to not bring upon conflict and troubles.

Hobbes' work further represents Enlightenment literature because of its defiance of past traditions and precedents. In this manner, Leviathan held many revolutionary ideas such as equal taxes regardless of wealth, most of which were based in his concept that all men held the same basic natural rights and that is would be in the best interest of the ruler of the men to protect these rights equally. Hobbes assertion that nature should be controlled by man for his own benefit also falls into the category of a new and defiant ideal. While touting the power of the absolute government, Hobbes does so only with the goal of displaying its importance to protect its "subjects" from civil and international wars and social conflicts instead of purely for the display of might and power.

In appealing to a reliance on human reason to change society for the better, Hobbes epitomizes the Enlightenment idea of breaking past "unjustifiable" troubles with the power of human reason and natural rights.

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