This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

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If humans lived in a state of nature, in other words a condition in which there was no political

organization, no political power, there would be catastrophic war and anarchy, at least according to Thomas Hobbs. The fame of Hobbs, who was writing

in the context of turmoil and civil war in England, rests mainly on Leviathan, his book about the relationship

between the citizen and the state.

Hobbs argued that we should seed the power to protect us to a mighty sovereign.

A leading authority, probably the leading authority on the life and political theory of Thomas Hobbs,

is the Cambridge professor, Quentin Skinner.

Quentin Skinner, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Well, very nice to talk to you. Now the topic we want to

focus on today is Hobbes' theory of the state. How would you characterize

Hobbes' Leviathan his great work of 1651? Well I think it is a theory of the state essentially and the title of

the book points to that. Leviathan is the name of the state. The state is the generic idea,

but Leviathan as Hobbs likes to put it in a sexual metaphor,

is engendered, it's brought into being, and so there is, as it were, an act of christening,

and the name of the state is Leviathan and that's

why it's the name of the book. What is the Leviathan though? Well the Leviathan is

the state and the question really is well what is the state and it's important that Hobbes is writing in a context in which the concept of the state was very widely employed in political argument,

but it tended to be associated with a view of popular sovereignty so

that the state is simply the name of the body of the people organized for political power.

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