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
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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Ambedkar's idea of social justice leads to 'egalitarian justice' as compared to Rawls' 'justice as fairness' which aims at the notion of 'pure procedural justice'. Comment
Next question in the 2022 paper (Q4). 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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