Alien Bookreader's Reviews > Leviathan

How to rate a philosophical text?

I find it very strange that reviewers say you shouldn’t rate a philosophical work according to if you agree with it or like the philosophy. The goal of any philosophical text is to present arguments and convince the reader of the conclusion that follows.

If a philosophical text presents faulty arguments or the conclusion doesn’t follow from the arguments, it’s a bad text and you should rate it accordingly. The same as if a text aims to be a comedy but fails to be funny. You should rate a book by the quality of its content and not by how “important” the author was historically, or how “influential” the text was. Bad texts can be written by important and influential people.

My Thoughts

I read excerpts of this book in my political philosophy class in university. The strangest thing about this book is that it advocates for a government of total dictatorship in order to “protect the people”. Hobbes doesn’t give many convincing arguments for how this will work or why it’s a morally acceptable form of government. His main argument is that religion can influence people to accept their place and accept the absolute authority of the monarch.

Reading this in a world that has now seen many dictatorships rise and fall, destroy entire populations through war, starvation, policing and killing citizens, we can conclude that giving absolute power to one individual over an entire population is not a good idea. It does not protect the people.

Is an absolute government ever justified?

My philosophy professor really tried to give us a generous interpretation of Hobbes by reminding us that he lived at a time of constant war, and he saw central, absolute power as a way to create stability and stop wars from occurring.

An interesting theory, but in practice, well… history has run this experiment already several times. Many people have died nasty and brutal deaths during these experiments. If Hobbes could see the 20th century, he would probably change his stance.

Maybe I’ll re-read it in the future, to get a deeper understanding. However I do find the philosophy of Hobbes to be misguided and contradictory in its assumptions about human nature. If humans are so prone to hurting each other, why would it be a good idea to give total power to one human to wield over others? It seems obvious that according to Hobbes' own view of humans, giving power to a human means that person will hurt others with it. It’s an inconsistency in his view of human nature.