Revision summary
Hobbes starts from separate, equal, self-preserving individuals, not from a natural polis. Their war of fear makes an undivided sovereign seem necessary. Macpherson named this possessive individualism. Locke keeps individuals and drops absolutism; Hobbes joins the two. The residual individual right is only against immediate self-destruction, not against the civil law as such.
Model answer
Copper italics in this answer — like this — are the key facts. Each one is unpacked in the Facts & figures rail.
Introduction
Thomas Hobbes builds an absolute sovereign out of individuals who fear death. The absolutism is not a medieval corporate chain. It is a machine assembled from equal, separate persons. Individualism is therefore not an accident of Leviathan. It is the starting point of the ideology.
Body
Individuals before the city
- Natural equality is equality of vulnerability: anyone may kill anyone. That is an individualist anthropology, not an Aristotelian zoon politikon.
- Each has a natural right to everything that seems to preserve himself. There is no shared summum bonum.
- Competition, diffidence, and glory are passions of separate agents. The state of war is a relation among individuals without a common judge.
- C. B. Macpherson called this possessive individualism: the person as owner of his own capacities, entering the market of security.
How individualism yields the absolute sword
- Covenants are acts of individuals who authorise one will. The sovereign is a representative person made by those acts.
- Because individuals will otherwise defect, the sword must be undivided. Absolutism is the security technology of atomised fear.
- The subject retains the inalienable individual right not to kill himself or to walk quietly to death, which is a residual individualism inside obedience.
- Religion, guild, and family are not allowed to become rival common powers. That flattening is individualist in method even when the result is a giant state.
Comment: inherent, not identical with liberalism
- Locke keeps individualism and refuses absolutism by adding natural law, property, and trust.
- Hobbes shows that individualism plus extreme insecurity can justify concentration, not only limitation.
- Rousseau attacked this path: the Hobbesian individual is already a product of a fallen comparison, not a natural given.
- Sandel’s later critique of the unencumbered self has a Hobbesian ancestor: persons without constitutive community need an artificial common power.
- Contemporary security states still use Hobbesian individualism: the isolated frightened subject who trades liberty for order.
Limit of the comment
- Hobbes also needs unity, honour of the sovereign, and civil religion. Those are not market individualism.
- Absolutist ideology here means undivided sovereignty, not a cult of the private consumer.
- The accurate comment is: methodological individualism is the premise; political absolutism is the inferred remedy.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD IND[Equal individuals] --> WAR[State of war] WAR --> COV[Covenant] COV --> ABS[Absolute sovereign] ABS --> RES[Residual right of life]
Conclusion
Hobbes’s absolutism is built from equal, fearful individuals who authorise one sword. Individualism is inherent as method and as residual right of self-preservation. It is not Lockean limited government. It is the paradox of modern sovereignty: atoms produce Leviathan.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Tools of legitimation of the State.
Next question on this syllabus topic (2021 · Q1(d)). View answer →
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If Hobbes is individualist, why is the state absolute?
Because he thinks only an undivided power can bind those individuals. Individualism of origin does not mean individualism of outcome.
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Is Hobbes a liberal?
He is a founder of modern individual rights and consent, and an opponent of limited government and divided sovereignty. The mix is his signature.
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