From Hobbes to Trotsky ~ Permanent Revolution

Daniel Lazare

02.19.25

Note from the editor: We are publishing this essay as the start of an ongoing discussion and debate on Marxism and philosophy. Readers can expect a response to this essay shortly.

Note to readers: I wrote this for Platypus Review, but withdrew it following Platypus founder Chris Cutrone’s disgraceful embrace of Trump’s aggression toward Canada and Greenland. See “Cheering on Trump,” Jan. 13.

There’s a rumor going around that the great English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was a conservative. The Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt thought so,[1] the left-liberal writer Corey Robin does so as well,[2] while a Maoist website informs us that “Hobbes’ political philosophy’s emphasis on an absolute sovereign is unacceptable for modern socialists.”[3] By the same token, Hobbes’s verdict on life in nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” is traditionally taken as an expression of anti-social pessimism and misanthropy – yet more evidence, supposedly, of Hobbes’s conservative leanings.

Hobbes at 89 portrait by John Michael Wright

But it ain’t necessarily so. The reason, simply, is that there is a direct line from the supposedly reactionary Hobbes to the most radical democratic movements of the eighteenth century and after. When Declaration of the Rights of Man stated in 1789 that “[t]he fundamental source of all sovereignty resides in the nation,” it was hard not to hear an echo of Hobbes’s argument concerning the necessity of establishing a monopoly of power. Although there is no evidence that Lincoln read Hobbes, his “House Divided” speech in 1858 not only employed one of the philosopher’s favorite biblical maxims,[4] but replicated his views on the indivisibility of the sovereign state. The same goes for Martin Luther King’s statement in Letter From Birmingham Jail: “Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”

As students of Hobbes will immediately notice, this is a reiteration of the Hobbesian principle that sovereignty’s sole concern is its own self-aggrandizement and hence that any law that enhances human sovereignty is good and that anything that detracts from it is bad. Whether sovereignty expresses itself in moral or political terms, whether it concerns itself with human personality or raw political power, its driving need is for more, i.e. more domination, more development, more control.

Then there is Trotsky, who declared in his 1920 polemic Terrorism and Communism:

...the road to Socialism lies through a period of the highest possible intensification of the principle of the State. And you and I are just passing through that period. Just as a lamp, before going out, shoots up in a brilliant flame, so the State, before disappearing, assumes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the most ruthless form of State, which embraces the life of the citizens authoritatively in every direction.[5]

While there’s no evidence that Trotsky read Hobbes either, this can’t help but call to mind his role as a pioneering theoretician of the modern state. As for the idea that Hobbes’s concept of absolute sovereignty is somehow at odds with socialist self-governance, Maoists, as usual, have it backwards. Not only does Hobbesian absolutism accord with socialism, it lies at its very core.

To be sure, it’s easy to see why people would get Hobbes wrong since he was an arch-autocrat whose ideas were extreme even by seventeenth-century standards. He conceived of sovereignty not just as power or even supreme power, but as the sole power from which all others derive. Not only would Hobbes have regarded Louis XIV’s statement, “L’État c’est moi,” as unobjectionable – he was a fan of the Sun King[6] – he might well have added, “L’État c’est tout” – the state is all. A sovereign according to Hobbes does not share power with lesser authorities. He or she does not agree to behave within set limits. To the contrary, his authority is permanent and unconstrained – “supreme, irresistible, absolute, uncontrolled,” in the words of the eighteenth-century legal commentator Sir William Blackstone. It is so complete and self-contained as to recognize no authority other than its own.

All of which Hobbes set forth in his master work, Leviathan, published while in exile from Cromwellian England in 1651. In it, we learn:

That no one can interpret the law other than the sovereign.
That individual freedom extends only so far as to what “the sovereign has permitted.”
That sovereignty is incapable of doing wrong because “nothing the sovereign representative can do to a subject, on what pretense soever, can properly be called an injustice or injury.”
That the sovereign is above the law because “to be subject to laws is to be subject to the commonwealth – that is, to the sovereign representative – that is, to himself, which is not subjection but freedom from the laws.”

While granting the sovereign total control over what people may say or publish, Leviathan – named, by the way for a biblical sea monster in the Book of Job – falls short of modern totalitarianism by specifying that only public behavior is worthy of concern and that whatever one does in private is no one’s business other than one’s own. So there’s no danger of the KGB breaking down the door in search of private notebooks. But it otherwise comes close. According to Hobbes, the individual has no freedom since freedom is solely a sovereign attribute. The sovereign commands while everyone else obeys.

Orwellian? Perhaps. But why did he take his arguments to such shocking lengths, what made him think that readers would find them persuasive, and what on earth does Hobbesian ultra-authoritarianism have to do with socialist democracy?

The answer to the first is easy: civil war, i.e. the Wars of Religion that ravaged France from 1562 to 1598, the Thirty Years’ War that destroyed much of Germany in 1618-48, and the English Civil War that began in 1642 and was still ongoing. The consequences were catastrophic. France was still recovering from the chaos by the time Hobbes wrote Leviathan, Germany had lost a third or more of its population, while fighting was engulfing the three realms of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Supposedly, Hobbes’s mother was so frightened by the approach of the Spanish Armada, which would have subjected English Protestants to a Catholic reign of terror, that she prematurely went into labor. As Hobbes recalled, “my mother gave birth to twins: myself and fear.”

But no less important than war was the secular response, which is to say a new generation of French politiques who sought to transcend the Protestant-Catholic divide; the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which sought a pragmatic and secular solution to the Thirty Years’ War, and Leviathan itself. Although it was a politique named Jean Bodin (1530-96) who invented the modern theory of sovereignty, it was Hobbes who would put it on a far more rigorous footing.

His inspiration was Euclid. While traveling as a tutor to a wealthy English family, the Oxford graduate found himself in a private library in Geneva in which a text by the Greek mathematician lay open to the Pythagorean theorem, which holds that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Thunderstruck at how an ancient thinker could use a handful of axioms to prove something so complicated, he resolved to put politics on an equally solid footing.

His starting postulate was not only the horrors of civil war but its necessary concomitant, the absence of authority capable of reining it in. “Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice,” Leviathan would declare. “Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.” Labor, investment, and profit were all inhibited. As a consequence:

In such condition there is no place for industry because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and, which is worst of all, a continual fear and danger of violent death.[7]

Hence his conclusion about life in such circumstances being solitary and poor – not, contrary to popular opinion, because human beings are innately vicious, but because an absence of law leaves even the mildest among them no choice but to resort to violence in order to defend oneself, one’s family, and one’s possessions. The problem, as Hobbes put it, is not that “man hopes for a more intensive delight than he has already attained to, or that he cannot be content with a moderate power,” but, rather, that “he cannot assure the power and means to live well which he has present without the acquisition of more.” Do unto others before they do unto you – such is the rule amid a war of “every man against every man.”[8] Hobbes’s thesis is that the more supreme power stamped out such anarchy, the better off society would be.

All of which may seem logical enough. But given Hobbes’s assumption that royal absolutism was best suited to the exercise of such power, it fairly begs the question of how he can be classified as anything other than a conservative, especially since the mid-1600s saw the first stirrings of modern democracy on the part of the Levelers, the Puritans in far-off New England, and other such forces. How can one squeeze a square peg like Hobbes into the round hole of democracy at all?

The answer has to do with certain loose threads that Hobbes was never able to tie up. While Leviathan assumes that monarchy is best, it allows that an aristocratic or democratic assembly could exercise sovereignty as well. Hobbes never explored how such alternatives would work or what effect they would have on the concept itself. But the fact that he allowed for the possibility suggests that he didn’t intend for the concept to be limited to any specific political form.

More important was his concept of social contract. This is what he saw as the grand bargain that would allow society to elect a sovereign guaranteeing the life and safety of all. While this, too, was less than fully worked out, the implications were paradoxical: the awesome tyranny that sovereignty represents is not merely something that people would submit to, but something they would democratically create. Where we tend to think of autocracy as yielding to democracy, Hobbes saw it as the other way around, which is to say democracy yielding to autocracy. As James Harrington, the author of the Cromwellian classic, The Commonwealth of Oceana, summed it up: “Mr. Hobbes holdeth democracy to be of all governments the first in modern order of time.”[9]

For royalists, this was a case of sneaking democracy in through the back door. Even worse was his assertion that not only was society’s task to place a sovereign on the throne, but to continuously monitor whether he was still up to the task. As Leviathan puts it: “The obligation of subjects to the sovereign is understood to last as long and no longer than the power lasts by which he is able to protect them.”[10] Conservatives were aghast. “The argument that there was a reciprocal relationship between a government’s protection and a subject’s obedience was ... distinctive and scandalous,” one historian notes.[11] Although Charles II was personally fond of Hobbes, he came under pressure from hardliners to let it be known that his old math tutor was no longer welcome in his Parisian court. Since this deprived Hobbes of protection against French Catholics who detested him even more, his only choice was to return to England and swear loyalty to the republican government he had previously opposed.

Hobbes was the kind of thinker who makes everyone uncomfortable, one with a foot in both autocratic and democratic camps, or perhaps in neither. Although Charles II welcomed Hobbes back into his good graces following restoration in 1660, Anglican churchmen continued to snipe at him for his reputed atheism while John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, published a decade after Hobbes’s death in 1679, was, with its theory of limited government, virtually an anti-Hobbesian polemic from start to finish. A new generation of radicals viewed him “as an apologist for tyranny, calumniator of republican assemblies, champion of censorship, and a thinker who had drawn an excessively pessimistic picture of natural humanity,” to quote the intellectual historian Jonathan Israel.[12] His fate seemed clear. However interesting and provocative his ideas, he would pay a growing price for being increasingly out of step with the times.

But a funny thing happened on the way to intellectual eclipse: the loose threads in Hobbesian ideology came together in a new and unexpected way as democracy emerged in more militant form. Rousseau was fiercely hostile, describing Hobbes’s concept of sovereignty as a means of extracting slavery from liberty. But Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès was a straight-out Hobbesian of the most unabashed sort. Sieyès, a free-thinking clergyman, was a key figure since his 1789 pamphlet “What Is the Third Estate,” virtually invented the modern bourgeois-democratic state. Indeed, entire passages read as if they were lifted straight out of Leviathan, except that it was now the people or the nation – terms that Sieyès viewed as synonymous – that were sovereign rather than a king.

“The nation is prior to everything,” the pamphlet declares. “It is the source of everything. Its will is always legal; indeed, it is the law itself.” It continues:

The power exercised by the government has substance only in so far as it is constitutional; it is legal only in so far as it is based on the prescribed laws. The national will, on the contrary, never needs anything but its own existence to be legal. It is the source of all legality. ... Let us not be afraid of repeating it: a nation is independent of any procedures; and no matter how it exercises its will, the mere fact of its doing so puts an end to positive law, because it is the source and the supreme master of positive law.

Where Hobbes thought of sovereignty and society as separate and distinct, “What Is the Third Estate” marked the start of a process of convergence that would unite them in one. Where formerly only the king was free, it was now popular sovereignty that was free to govern the people as it saw fit.

This did not make the doctrine any less tyrannical. If anything, it made it more so. Formerly, even an autocrat like Louis XIV had struggled to transform France from a patchwork of provincial customs and privileges to something more centralized and uniform. Yet he failed to the point that, following his death in 1715, France found itself in the grips of a full-blown aristocratic reaction in which provincial privileges were once more on the ascendant. Yet the new constituent assembly that took power in 1789 abolished such privileges at a stroke by doing away with age-old provinces like Normandy and Brittany and replacing them with uniform départements. It was rather as if the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia had abolished Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York and replaced them with uniform administrative districts. The regional law courts known as parlements were strongholds of aristocratic power that had also hampered the crown at every turn. Yet a few months after sweeping away the provinces, the constituent assembly swept them away too. Where previously the parlements were a constituent element that shaped the ancien régime, the new super-Hobbesian society reduced such elements to just one: the people.

The new Hobbes turned the old Hobbes on his head – or on his feet. Simultaneously, it tied up the loose threads that Hobbes had left hanging. Try as one might, it was hard to imagine how showering Louis XIV with ermine and silk might benefit the beleaguered French peasantry. But now that the people were sovereign, it was clear how they would benefit by the concentration of absolute power in their hands. As a good Puritan, Hobbes had described God as “sovereign of sovereigns.”[13] But how could multiple infinite powers rule simultaneously even if they were as far apart as heaven and earth? As divided as Jacobins were on the religious question, the revolution opened the door to a new concept of “storming the heavens” in which revolutionaries resolved to overthrow divine sovereignty so that human sovereignty might flourish.

The new Hobbes also shed light on what might be described as the “e pluribus unum” problem. Declared Leviathan:

A multitude of men are made one person when they are by one man, or one person, represented; so that it is done with the consent of every one of that multitude in particular. For it is the unity of the representer, not the unity of the represented, that maketh the person one.

A formless aggregate thus transformed itself into a unified entity in the course of creating a sovereign power to rule over it. Its unity depended on the unity of the sovereign. For Sieyès, who defined the people as “a unity capable of constitutive action,” many became one by constituting themselves as a sovereign force. Rather than unity without, they short-circuited the process by creating it within. Not only were they sovereign over society, but they were sovereign over themselves.

Self-constitution, self-transformation, self-sovereignty – all began to stir with the great bourgeois-democratic revolution of 1789. Then there is socialism. Obviously, Marxism does not believe in the social contract other than in the most abstract metaphorical sense. But when the Communist Manifesto declared that “[t]he proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority,” what it was saying, in effect, was that the task before the working class was to remove sovereignty from the bourgeois state and make it its own. Where the manifesto declared that “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” it implied that the Hobbesian converse was also true, which is that the free development of all is the condition for the free development of each. If man is to “revolve about himself as his own true sun,” it means that humanity must assert its sovereignty over society, nature, and itself so as to collectively address its own needs and wants. The state withers away to the degree that human society and sovereignty merge so completely that each disappears as a separate element. External coercion vanishes the more collective self-discipline is fully internalized.

The idea that Hobbes is somehow at odds with socialist self-governance is therefore nonsense. Communism is human self-sovereignty raised to the highest degree.

As for Terrorism and Communism, which Trotsky says he wrote “in the car of a military train ... amid the flames of civil war,”[14] the book is nothing if not controversial since, rather than apologizing for the militarization of labor and other draconian policies, it celebrates them. As Trotsky put it:

...we are making the first attempt in world-history to organize labor in the interests of the laboring majority itself. This, however, does not exclude the element of compulsion in all its forms, both the most gentle and the extremely severe. The element of State compulsion not only does not disappear from the historical arena, but on the contrary will still play, for a considerable period, an extremely prominent part.

To be sure, Trotsky stressed that “[i]f compulsory labor came up against the opposition of the majority of the workers, it would turn out a broken reed, and with it the whole of the Soviet order.” The militarization of labor therefore had to be “by the will of the workers themselves.” But militarization is still militarization, so it still raises the question of how a society in which compulsion plays “an extremely prominent part” can lead to one in which it plays no part at all.

As Hobbes might have replied – had he freed himself from Christianity, private property, and all the rest – the establishment of proletarian sovereignty is the first task. Democracy must lead to the proletarian dictatorship, “the most ruthless form of State,” which in turn must lead to socialism the more class rule is democratized. But just as the sovereign’s first duty is to its own self-aggrandizement, revolution’s first duty is to its own survival.

Like Hegel, Hobbes is an example of a thinker who helped propel bourgeois ideology in the direction of revolutionary democracy and then socialism. Marx, who did read Hobbes, paid tribute to him and his fellow materialists. As “[g]eometry is proclaimed the cardinal science,” he wrote in 1845, “...materialism is rationalized, and it develops also the ruthless logicality of reason.” He went on:

It needs no special ingenuity to discover in the doctrines of materialism (concerning the natural goodness and the equal mental endowments of man, the omnipotence of experience, habit, and education, the influence of external circumstances on man, the great importance of manufactures, the legitimacy of enjoyment) the necessary connection with Communism and Socialism. If man receives from the external world and from his experience in the external world all his feelings, ideas, etc., then it is evidently our business to reorganize the empirical world in such a manner that man should only experience the really humane and acquire the habit of it. ... If man is formed by circumstances, then we must humanize the circumstances. If man is social by nature, then man develops his true nature in society only, and we must not measure the power of his nature by the power of a single individual, [but] by the power of society.[15]

The royal “we” becomes the proletarian “we” under socialism as workers “humanize the circumstances and empower society.” Society taking control of itself in order to transform itself – this is the process that Hobbes first glimpsed in 1651. The task of revolutionary socialism nearly four centuries later is to carry the same process through to completion.

[1] In 1938, Schmitt identified his fate with the “lonely philosopher from Malmesbury,” whom he described as “lonely as every pioneer; misunderstood as is everyone whose political thought does not gain acceptance among his own people; unrewarded, as one who opened a gate through which others marched on....” Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan and the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, trans. G. Schwab and E. Hilfstein (Westport: Greenwood Press. 2004), 86. See also R. Omur Birler, The Leviathan and the Contours of Conservative Imagination: The Role of Thomas Hobbes in the Works of Schmitt, Strauss and Oakeshott (Ottawa: Carlton Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 2007), 75.

[2] Corey Robin, “The First Counter-revolutionary,” The Nation, Sept. 30, 2009, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/first-counter-revolutionary/.

[3] Carlos L. Garrido, “Thomas Hobbes – The Communist?” Midwestern Marx Institute, July 7, 2021, https://www.midwesternmarx.com/articles/thomas-hobbes-the-communist-by-carlos-l-garrido.

[4] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1958), 150. See also Mark 3:25, Matthew 12:25, and Luke 11:17.

[5] See chapter eight “Problems of the Organization of Labor.”

[6] James J. Hamilton, “Hobbes the Royalist, Hobbes the Republican,” History of Political Thought 30, no. 3 (Autumn 2009), 419.

[7] Hobbes, Leviathan. 107-08.

[8] Ibid., 86, 106.

[9] Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006), 226.

[10] Ibid., 179.

[11] Timothy Raylor, “The Anglican Attack on Hobbes in Paris, 1651,” The Historical Journal 53, no. 1 (March 2010), 159.

[12] Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 226.

[13] Hobbes, Leviathan, 266.

[14] L Trotsky, The Defence of Terrorism (London: Routledge, 2014), i. The quote is from an introduction to a new British edition of Terrorism and Communism that Trotsky wrote in 1935.

[15] The Holy Family (1845), available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/english-materialism.htm.