Thomas Hobbes and British liberty under the law

Until recently, Britain was widely admired for embodying the preeminent model of good government and political success. But what exactly defines this distinctive quality? Is it the nation’s democracy, its Enlightenment values, or perhaps its role in promoting human rights? While these may indeed represent historic achievements, they don’t fully capture what has made the British system unique.

To identify what sets Britain apart, we need a more concise, philosophically grounded definition. The conservative political philosopher Ken Minogue expressed it well with his evocative phrase: liberty-under-the-law. This principle is clear: law is our guide, law is binding, and liberty is its beneficial by-product.

But where does this idea originate? For an unsurpassed philosophical exploration of liberty-under-the-law, we need look no further than Thomas Hobbes.

Hobbes wrote his masterpiece, Leviathan, in 1651, while in exile following the turmoil of the English Civil War. In the wake of the collapse of civil order, Hobbes, a thinker of extraordinary intellectual power and fierce independence, set out to explore the deep causes of political failure—and conversely, the foundations for political success.

Thomas Hobbes

It is unfortunate that a thinker who did so much to articulate Britain’s unique political identity has been so often misunderstood. Many who are unfamiliar with Hobbes associate him only with his famous description of the natural condition of humanity, in the absence of a strong ruler, as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. This phrase, often quoted out of context, has fuelled two diametrically opposed readings of Hobbes’s political philosophy. On one hand, he is seen as an uncompromising authoritarian, demanding unconditional obedience to the ruler, regardless of the ruler’s quality—transforming him into a reactionary conservative akin to the French monarchists Bonald or de Maistre. On the other, his apparent endorsement of a social contract based purely on self-interest has led some to view him as the progenitor of a rationalist, individualist strain of liberalism—a kind of Thatcherite in caricature.

Hobbes, however, is neither of these things. These anachronistic, Whiggish projections do a grave disservice to his thought. While Hobbes is undoubtedly a key modern thinker, his philosophy remains deeply rooted in premodern norms and assumptions. To understand him properly, we must focus on three crucial aspects of his thought.

First, Hobbes is a believing Christian who embraces the Biblical and Augustinian notion that pride is humanity’s gravest sin. To Hobbes, “men are in continual competition for honour and dignity”, and it is this “vainglory” or esteem-seeking self-assertion that lies at the root of political strife. While the ancient Greeks understood pride as immoderation or foolishness, Hobbes viewed it as sin—a force that brings chaos and insecurity to the world. As Hobbes put it: “It is to man’s advantage to be in subjection to God, and it is calamitous for him to act according to his own will.”

Secondly, Hobbes, as Michael Oakeshott notes in his insightful introduction to Leviathan, belongs to a medieval nominalist tradition, rather than a realist one. For Hobbes, God’s will is supreme, and the world must be understood as an artifice of God’s creation. While this might seem like a scholastic detail, it is crucial: Hobbes submits to a doctrine of divine command and holds that reason, though consistent with divine law, cannot possess binding authority. This stance places Hobbes in contrast to Greek philosophy. It aligns him with empirically-minded medieval English thinkers like William of Ockham, as opposed to thinkers more influenced by Plato and Aristotle, such as Aquinas.

The third, and most distinctive, aspect of Hobbes’s philosophy is how he combines these insights into a political theology that can best be described as Hebraic.

What does this mean? For one, Hobbes draws his primary inspiration from the Hebrew Bible, especially the story of Moses receiving the law on Mount Sinai. It is no coincidence that Moses appears in Leviathan 252 times—far more than Aristotle (37) or Plato (14). To Hobbes, the revelation at Sinai was a singular act of grace, an expression of divine transcendence, and an imposition of absolute obligation on the people. In contrast to Greek philosophy, Hobbes’s Hebraism privileges will and artifice over reason and nature.

In the desert, the Israelites make a sacrifice: they relinquish their pride and submit entirely to the sovereign power of Moses, who alone is authorised to interpret and apply the law. Hobbes calls this a covenant, which is distinct from a contract (covenant is mentioned in Leviathan 185 times). A contract involves mutual obligations regarding limited matters, while a covenant binds individuals to eternal, divinely ordained obligations. It is the sovereign’s duty to enforce these laws, as Moses did. Moses’s successors, over a long history, might be a judicial council, a monarch, an assembly, or the king-in-parliament, but in every case, the authority to interpret and apply the divine law belongs to them exclusively, acting as a sovereign body. This arrangement is pivotal in Hobbes’s thought: the sovereign is empowered by a divine-human covenant and must always act in accordance with divine law.

For Hobbes, the coming of Christ does not annul the covenant established at Sinai—it renews it. The reason, he argues, is that the Jews fell into disobedience and lost sight of the holy Law—a view shared, incidentally, by many orthodox Jews to this day. As a Christian, Hobbes affirms that Christ offers eternal salvation. But until His return, humanity must live as though God were absent, relying in the meantime on the original, provisional arrangement established through Moses. In this audacious theological move, Hobbes asserts something quite extraordinary: the coming of Christ carries no political significance whatsoever.

Hobbes is scathing in his assessment of the post-Constantinian Church, which he sees as having illegitimately seized the political authority that rightly belongs to the sovereign—the Leviathan—as the interpreter and enforcer of divine law. He rejects Augustine’s division between the city of God and the city of man, as well as the neat separation between divine and secular power implied in Christ’s saying, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” For Hobbes, Caesar himself must be subject to divine law. Only when “kings were pastors, and pastors kings,” he writes, could there be an authorised and unified interpretation of divine command. And this condition, he believes, was finally fulfilled in England—first under Henry VIII, and more decisively under Elizabeth I—when the monarchy broke decisively from the authority of Rome.

And so we return to the heart of what, in Hobbes’s view, made England exceptional. The sovereign commands ultimate political authority and demands obedience—but finally, in Protestant England, this very structure creates the conditions in which individuals are free to cultivate what Hobbes calls “the interiority of faith”. In other words, political obedience is not the enemy of liberty, but its necessary foundation. “In the present moment in England,” Hobbes writes, “Christ’s covenant can be renewed.”

Here we find a compelling articulation of what a liberty-under-the-law constitutional order might truly entail: liberty and authority are not in opposition; on the contrary, the more authority we have of the right kind, the more liberty we have as well. In this, we can see the originality, and enduring value, of Hobbes’s political theology.

So what does Hobbes have to say to us in the 21st century, particularly now that Britain seems to have lost the self-confidence that once defined its political identity?

First, Hobbes reminds us that there is indeed something unique about the principles of liberty-under-the-law that have grounded Britain’s political order. While many nations have contributed to civilisational progress in art, music, science, and literature, Britain stands out for its ability to produce political stability based on the rule of law. By any reckoning, this is a remarkable achievement that has positioned Britain and the English-speaking world (once America had followed Britain’s lead) as the natural leaders of a liberal order.

Secondly, Hobbes reminds us that a religious or divine dimension remains integral to the liberty-under-the-law tradition. In England—and in America too—religion has never been merely a private affair. The notion that “kings are pastors and pastors kings”, that the English monarch is Defender of the Faith, and that in the United States the civil order is seen as an instrument of divine providence, speaks to a deeper conviction: that rulers in the Anglophone tradition are morally accountable to God.

This sharply contrasts with the political settlement that emerged on the European continent after the French Revolution. There, politics has often been marked by a kind of schizophrenia—oscillating on the one hand between secular Enlightenment ideals of abstract rights, grounded in the supremacy of human reason, and on the other, either a reactionary romanticism that mythologises the nation-state, or a progressive utopianism that dreams of perfect equality; in each case, amounting in practice to submission to the morally-unconstrained assertiveness of human will.

From the seventeenth century onward, political thought in Europe diverged significantly from that of the Anglosphere. At the heart of this divergence was Hobbes’s contemporary, Spinoza, who broke decisively with the idea that revelation or divine command could hold political authority. Spinoza placed his faith in reason alone—as revealed through contemplation of nature—as the foundation for a tolerant liberal order. But this rationalist, secular model gained little traction in the English-speaking world—at least, not until quite recently.

Third, Hobbes teaches us about the importance of a law rooted in Biblical morality. Such a law reminds us that we are flawed and fallible, easily misled by pride. What this entails is deep scepticism toward ideology, along with an affirmation of the need for strong state institutions to enforce the law, such that the political order remains grounded in humility, tolerance, and moral accountability.

It is a stark measure of how far we have strayed from Hobbes’s vision that we now seem to inhabit its inverse. Where Hobbes advocated for a strong, law-enforcing sovereign to secure civil peace, we are confronted with institutions too timid to uphold the law against a civil society—or more accurately, an uncivil society—increasingly shaped by antinomian activists. There is a vital distinction between institutions that are responsive to public opinion and those that capitulate to public hysteria. Today, we see the latter: schools and museums hastily “decolonising” their curricula and exhibitions in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests; governments passing economically and geopolitically ruinous legislation to placate eco-activist lobbies; public broadcasters and cultural institutions swept up in a mob-fuelled frenzy of anti-Israel demonisation. The effect is the same across the board: it is the antinomians—those engaged in performative moralistic grandstanding, heedless of the consequences—who increasingly dictate the terms of our public life.

Among them, the radical Left and their Islamist fellow-travellers exhibit precisely the traits Hobbes warned were most corrosive to civil association: prideful self-assertion, a hunger for esteem, and the reckless pursuit of ideological validation. And those in positions of authority—who should know better—too often resemble T.S. Eliot’s hollow men: voiceless, nerveless, morally vacant. One is reminded of the warning in Leviticus: “The sound of a driven leaf shall put them to flight… and they shall fall when none pursues.”

Finally, Hobbes offers a clear-sighted lesson in how we should order our political priorities. Britain’s historical success has rested not on ethnic or nationalist identity, but on its civic ideals, enshrined in its legal and constitutional traditions. Figures like the head teacher of Michaela School, Katharine Birbalsingh, with her dedication to building strong institutions and nurturing civic pride across diverse communities, embody this idea in practice. (At her academically high-performing school, Hijab-wearing Muslim girls are made to sing the National Anthem every day, and taught to love their country, and learn its history).

Katharine Birbalsingh CBE

What sets Britain apart, in the end, is not a mythologised national essence, but the enduring legacy of a political order grounded in liberty-under-the-law. As Hobbes understood, this order is not merely the product of human design, but the expression of a divine-human covenant—a foundation that even the most sceptical among us might be willing to hold sacred.

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