Thomas Hobbes published Leviathan in 1651, during the English Interregnum following the Civil War and execution of Charles I. The book develops a systematic political philosophy from a materialist account of human nature. Hobbes argues that human beings in a state of nature, without political authority, are in a condition of permanent war of all against all, where life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." To escape this condition, people rationally consent to transfer their individual sovereignty to a commonwealth, represented by a sovereign, individual or assembly, whose authority must be absolute and indivisible to prevent the return to civil war. Leviathan, the sovereign body politic, is named for the sea monster in Job.
Hobbes's argument is architecturally ambitious: he builds from the mechanics of perception through psychology to political philosophy without appealing to divine authority or natural law in the theological sense. His materialism was radical in 1651 and produced immediate controversy, with critics accusing him of atheism and of providing a justification for tyranny. The latter accusation is more complex: Hobbes argues for obedience to existing authority primarily on the grounds that any functioning sovereign is better than civil war, not on the grounds that sovereignty is morally praiseworthy. His account of what citizens are owed, physical safety and the protection of the conditions of economic life, in exchange for their obedience is more limited than divine-right theorists offered and more precise about what sovereign power is actually for.
Leviathan is foundational reading for political philosophy and remains the most uncompromising statement of the case that political order is not natural but constructed, that its maintenance requires concentrated power, and that the alternative to functioning political authority is not freedom but collective insecurity. Whether Hobbes's picture of human nature is accurate, and whether the concentration of sovereign power he argues for is the only solution to the problem he identifies, are questions that political theory has been arguing for 370 years, which is the measure of how well Hobbes stated the original problem.
Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations entirely as private notes, he never intended anyone else to read them.
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