Abstract
Thomas Hobbes is a British philosopher, born in 1588. Among his prolific work, one book will become one of the major founder pieces of the modern political thought; Leviathan (1651). In this work, Hobbes writes about the natural condition of mankind, and its consequences. He thus joins the lineage of the social contract's philosophers, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau or John Locke. One may ask why we shall bother to study such old pieces of writing; the answer is actually quite simple. The theory of the social contract is the very base of our whole political society, and some aspects of Hobbes work are still helpful to understand our world; as an example, many actual or recent totalitarian states have found a justification to their exaction in Hobbes's work.
In Leviathan, Hobbes is actually trying to justify the imposition of the political authority, the metaphorical Leviathan. In order to prove his point, that "a life without government is not worth living" (Newey, 2008, p2), Hobbes uses his own analysis of the natural condition of mankind, the state of nature, which could be defined as "the simple condition where we are forced into contact with each other in the absence of a superior authority that can lay down and enforce rules to govern our behavior toward each other" (Ryan, 2009, p217-218). What is then the natural condition of mankind, and why did this consideration lead to the necessity of the strong Leviathan state?
We will first study the main features of the Hobbesian man, in order to determine the consequences of the above mentioned nature on the interactions between men in the state of nature, and to finally see why the Leviathan became necessary.
