Thomas Hobbes influenced American government by giving the founders two things they built on and one thing they threw out. They took his diagnosis of human nature as selfish and prone to violence, and they took his social contract framework in which legitimate government rests on the consent of the governed. They rejected his prescription, which was an absolute, undivided sovereign. The result is a system that accepts Hobbes’s pessimism about people while refusing his solution for controlling them.
The Hobbesian Argument in Brief
Hobbes believed people are fundamentally self-interested and driven by desires for power and safety. Without a governing authority, he argued, this produces a “state of nature” defined by fear and violence, a “war of all against all” in which no one can build, trade, or plan. His escape from this condition was the social contract: rational people surrender their individual freedoms to a sovereign power in exchange for protection. Hobbes wanted that sovereign absolute and undivided, a “Leviathan” with total authority. Splitting power, he thought, would only invite the factions that made the state of nature dangerous.
One exception ran through his system. Even under an all-powerful sovereign, Hobbes maintained that no person could truly surrender the right to resist violence against their own body. A covenant not to defend yourself from force, he wrote, is always void. That idea, that self-preservation is inalienable, planted a seed the American founders would grow in directions Hobbes never intended.
Consent of the Governed in the Founding Documents
The Declaration of Independence reads like a social contract in action. Its central claim is that “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and that when a government destroys the rights it was created to protect, the people can alter or abolish it.1National Archives. Declaration of Independence: A Transcription That is the contractual logic Hobbes pioneered. Government exists because people agreed to create it, not because of divine right or inherited tradition.
The Declaration’s authors drew more directly from John Locke, who revised Hobbes by making the contract conditional on protecting natural rights and revocable when the sovereign violates those terms. But the underlying architecture, the idea that legitimate government rests on a contract between the governed and the governing, traces back to Hobbes.
The Constitution’s Preamble echoes Hobbesian priorities more plainly. Among its stated purposes are to “insure domestic Tranquility” and “provide for the common defence,” language that maps closely onto Hobbes’s central argument that the whole point of government is to prevent the chaos of the state of nature.2Cornell University Law School – Legal Information Institute. Preamble: Historical Background
Human Nature in the Federalist Papers
The clearest Hobbesian fingerprints on American government appear in the Federalist Papers, where Hamilton and Madison built their case for the Constitution on assumptions Hobbes would have recognized immediately.
Hamilton on Ambition and the State of War
Alexander Hamilton made the Hobbesian case most explicitly. In Federalist No. 6, he attacked the notion that independent American states could coexist peacefully without a strong central government. “To presume a want of motives for such contests as an argument against their existence,” he wrote, “would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious.”3The Avalon Project. The Federalist Papers No. 6 He dismissed the hope of harmony among sovereign states as a “deceitful dream of a golden age.”
In Federalist No. 15, Hamilton described the Articles of Confederation in terms that could have come from Hobbes’s own pen. A government that cannot enforce its laws amounts to nothing more than advice, and when the only way to enforce rules on sovereign states is military force, every dispute becomes a “state of war.”4The Avalon Project. The Federalist Papers No. 15 Hamilton asked bluntly: “Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint.” That is Hobbes’s philosophy compressed into one line.
Madison on Faction and Institutional Design
James Madison framed the same problem differently. In Federalist No. 10, he identified “factions,” groups of citizens united by passions or interests hostile to the rights of others, as the greatest threat to democratic government. The causes of faction, he wrote, are “sown in the nature of man.” Left unchecked in pure democracies, they produce “spectacles of turbulence and contention” incompatible with personal security or property rights. That description parallels Hobbes’s state of nature closely.
Madison’s solution was not Hobbes’s absolute sovereign. He proposed a large republic with so many competing factions that no single one could dominate. Where Hobbes concentrated all power in one place, Madison dispersed power across a continent.
Federalist No. 51 makes the connection between human nature and institutional design explicit: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”5The Avalon Project. The Federalist Papers No. 51 Checks and balances work, Madison argued, because they harness self-interest against itself. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” The founders accepted the cynical premise about human motivation and built a system that turns it into a feature.
Shays’ Rebellion and the Case for Central Authority
The period between independence and the Constitution gave Americans a taste of something uncomfortably close to Hobbes’s state of nature. The Articles of Confederation created a national government too weak to tax, regulate commerce, or raise an army. Revolutionary War debt crushed state budgets, businesses failed, and trade collapsed.6National Constitution Center. 3.1 Info Brief: Summary of Shays’ Rebellion
Shays’ Rebellion in 1786 made the crisis concrete. When Massachusetts farmers, many of them Revolutionary War veterans drowning in debt, took up arms against state courts, the national government could do nothing. Congress had no power to raise troops and could only ask states for help, without any way to compel them. Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and others took the rebellion as proof that the Articles were too weak to govern the country, and they feared more uprisings would follow.6National Constitution Center. 3.1 Info Brief: Summary of Shays’ Rebellion
The Constitution answered directly. Article I gave Congress the power to raise armies and to call forth the militia to “suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.”7Constitution Annotated. Article I Section 8 Clause 15 The structure of the new federal government reflected a Hobbesian lesson the founders had learned firsthand: without a central authority capable of enforcing laws, society risks sliding into the chaos Hobbes described.
Where the Founders Broke From Hobbes
For all his influence, the American system is in many ways a deliberate repudiation of Hobbes’s conclusions. The founders accepted his premise about human nature but rejected his prescription.
Popular Sovereignty Instead of an Absolute Sovereign
Hobbes argued that once people entered the social contract, they could not revoke it. The sovereign’s only real obligation was keeping subjects alive, and as long as it did that, they had no right to rebel. The American system inverts this. Sovereignty rests with the people, not the government, and the Declaration explicitly reserves the right to overthrow a government that fails them. Hobbes’s contract was permanent and one-directional. The American version, following Locke, is conditional and revocable.
Divided Power Instead of Undivided Power
Hobbes believed divided authority was a recipe for civil war. The founders believed concentrated authority was a recipe for tyranny. The Constitution splits power among three branches of government: legislative, executive, and judicial. Each branch can restrain the others.8USAGov. Branches of the U.S. Government The president can veto legislation. Congress can override vetoes, confirm or reject nominations, and impeach. The Supreme Court can strike down unconstitutional laws.
Madison recognized the tradeoff. Separating powers makes it harder for government to threaten liberty, but it also makes it harder for government to do anything at all. The founders accepted that cost. They had read enough Hobbes to fear anarchy but lived through enough British rule to fear unchecked power more.
Self-Preservation as an Inalienable Right
One of Hobbes’s most surprising ideas was that even under an all-powerful sovereign, the right to defend your own life can never be surrendered. No person, he wrote, can be understood to have given up the right to resist someone assaulting them by force. Hobbes framed this as biological reality rather than moral principle. People will fight to survive no matter what any contract says.
American legal thought took the concept and transformed it. The Declaration lists “Life” as the first of the inalienable rights government exists to protect. The Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment in District of Columbia v. Heller framed the right to bear arms as rooted in a “prepolitical right to self-preservation” that the Constitution codified rather than created. Legal scholars have noted the tension with Hobbes’s original intent. Hobbes viewed self-defense as a political problem to be solved by a strong state, not a moral right to be celebrated. American law took his concept and turned it into something closer to a positive right.
The Hobbesian Pull in Modern Governance
The tension between Hobbesian security and American liberty did not end at the founding. It resurfaces whenever the nation faces a serious threat. In emergencies, the executive branch accumulates power in ways that look more Hobbesian than Madisonian, justified by the same logic Hobbes used: someone has to act decisively when survival is at stake.
Hamilton planted the seed in Federalist No. 70, arguing that “energy in the executive” is essential for security against anarchy. Modern debates about presidential emergency powers follow the same thread. Jefferson himself conceded that clinging too rigidly to written law during a genuine emergency risks “losing the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us.”
Critics have pointed out that this reasoning creates a permanent escape hatch from constitutional limits. Whenever national security demands it, the government can set aside its Lockean commitments to limited, open governance and revert to something closer to Hobbes’s model of near-total executive authority. The Cold War, the War on Terror, and debates over domestic surveillance have all played out along this fault line. The American system contains both impulses, and the balance between them shifts with each generation’s sense of how dangerous the world actually is.
Hobbes would probably find the whole arrangement unstable. He argued that dividing sovereignty invites the factional conflict that destroys states. Two and a half centuries later, American government remains an ongoing bet that he was wrong about the solution, even if he was largely right about the problem.