If you’ve ever looked into or have been interested in political philosophy, you’ve heard of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes is one of the most legendary names of polticial philosophy, a 17th century English philosopher (as well as scientist and historian), that had a heavy influence on a theory that eventually developed into the social contract theory, which we’ll touch on later. 

Thomas Hobbes was born in 1588, in Westport, Wiltshire, in England. His father abandoned him and his two brothers to the care of Thomas’s uncle. He ended up going to Oxford University at the age of 15, where he majored in traditional arts and, surprisingly, took up an interest in maps. He died from a stroke, in 1679 at the age of 91, in the Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire. 

For most of his life, Hobbes worked for rich, aristocrat families, working as tutors, translators, business representatives, political advisors etc. While working their, he became associated with royals, specifically between the royalists’ disputes with the parliament, until the eruption of the English Civil Wars from 1642 to 1651. During this conflict, Hobbes stood on the royalists’/king’s side, and wrote a treatise, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, on defending the king’s prerogatives. The treatise became widely popular, as more and more royalists used arguments from his treatise in debates. 

This experience was believed to be highly influencial to his beliefs as a philosophy. Due to his experiences, he was exposed to the chaos and suffering that separation and disagreement on the powers of the ruler can bring, and proposed his own thoughts in some of his masterpieces, including the Leviathan, or Behemoth, that eventually became the foundations for the political concept: the social contract theory. Because he saw the conflict as the parliament and citizens refusing to obey the king, he came up with the idea of a social contract, which basically tells of the contract between a ruler and its citizens, that in order to protect the citizens’ rights and livelihood the most, and for the ruler to most effectively keep order, they need to unconditionally obey the ruler’s commands. 

But what does all this have to do with death?

Hobbes believes that the inherent nature of humans is selfish and individualistic. If society didn’t exist and humans were still cavemen, Hobbes believes that everyone’s lives would be in a state of “continual fear, and danger of violent death”, as he writes in the Leviathan, “Life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. He believed this state also continues into war, that war exhibits the same aspects and qualities of what it would be like for humans to live in a state of nature. However, if a country were to enter a state of warfare, because of the social contract, he wold expect the country’s citizens to, without question, submit themselves to the hands of the ruler, and fight for this country. Although he thinks that individuals sought to escape the the natural state of terror and death by establishing and joining civil society, he expects the citizens to, once again, submit themselves to the natural state, for a selfless cause. 

Hobbes also believes that the fear of death isn’t absolute. There are some political theories reliant on the fear of death among people and citizens, to obey the absolute power of the ruler, but Hobbes believes otherwise. When Hobbes wrote the Leviathan and his other political works, it was a time when significant populations of England, Scotland, and Ireland sacrificed themselves for the civil war, due to honour, religious or political reasons. So it would be understandable if Hobbes believed that the concept of death itself didn’t affect the citizens of different countries anymore. Instead, Hobbes believes an unspoken agreement, or a moral obligation should be in place for the citizens to follow the ruler’s wishes, instead of any physical (death) punishment. 

Aside from political philosophy, Hobbes was also a materialist (resulting from the fact that he was a empiricist), which basically means that he believes all humans beings (and to some extent, God) is physical material, including their mind. He believes things that are incorporeal to be nonsensical and untrue. Following up the previous argument of the fact that he doesn’t think the fear of death is absolute, this could be because he believes humans to be physical. Because humans are entirely physical and do not have a mind or a soul that continues to exist after death, there is no reason to fear death. If death is just like falling asleep, without consciousness of the fact that you’ve died, what reason is there to fear death? 

Overall, Hobbes doesn’t discuss much about the concept of death, or the action of dying itself, but rather focuses more on death, and perhaps the fear and horror that comes along with the state of nature (which may bring inevitable death), and what it would mean to a nation, or the ruler of a nation. What do you think? Is it justifiable for the ruler of a country to order its soldiers to die simply because of the ruler’s wishes? How important or significant should life be to the individual?

Bibliography:

Duncan, Stewart. “Thomas Hobbes” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hobbes/

Sorell, Tom. “Thomas Hobbes” Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Hobbes.

McClure, C. S. (2014). War, Madness, and Death: The Paradox of Honor in Hobbes’s Leviathan. The Journal of Politics, 76(1), 114–125. doi:10.1017/s0022381613001072 

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. University of Oregon, 1999.