As indicated in my post of August 21, I am delivering on this site a very short course on the classics of literature on leadership. (See the post for how “classic” is defined.)
The course will draw on my edited volume, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). Here I can provide only short bursts of texts. My hope is that they will prompt you to dig deeper.
The selections are grouped into three parts. Part I comprises classics About Leadership. Part II is a compilation of Literature as Leadership. And Part III consists of selections by Leaders in Action. Leaders who have used words – written, oral, or both – as instruments of leadership.
In the coming weeks, the entries are in Part I. They are About Leadership.
Today we turn to Thomas Hobbes, to his book, Leviathan. I have always had a special interest in Leviathan – I am almost tempted to write fondness for it- as the book is one of the first important works to emphasize not just the importance of leaders but of followers. Given that I consider followers as important as leaders it’s heartening that, even preceding the Enlightenment, one of the major political philosophers focused on the rights of ordinary people.
To be clear, their rights were modest enough. First was the right to life which, however, given the time in which Hobbes lived, the assertion of which was no small thing. Think of it this way. Not much more than a hundred years passed between the publication of Prince and Leviathan. But whereas Machiavelli was nearly entirely focused on the near boundless rights of the prince, Hobbes insisted on the all-important right to life not just of the prince, but of his subjects.
Further, though Hobbes declared that once there was a leader that leader had to be all powerful, there could be no leader without the consent of those who were to be led. During a time when monarchs still strode the world like the kings and, sometimes, queens they were, this was, itself, revolutionary.
Hobbes’s was, however, disposed to be dark. His view of human nature was bleak, his view of the human condition even bleaker. Because we were not to be trusted, because we, you and me, were fearful and rapacious, selfish and dangerous, we had no choice, really, but to be governed by a super strong leader of a super strong state. Otherwise, we were destined, doomed, to do each other in. To put it differently, though directly, Hobbes believed that for even our right to life be realized, we had to surrender nearly every other right to the state.
From Leviathan – “On the Natural Condition of Mankind as Concerning their Felicity and Misery”:
- The difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he. For as to strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself.
- Therefore, if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies.
- Hereby it is manifest that men [must have] a common power, a [strong state, a leviathan] to keep them all in awe [lest there is a war] of every man against every man.
- [But] nor can any law be made till they [the people] have agreed upon the person that shall make it.