The Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes: The Sovereign and the State

We all live in states today, and Thomas Hobbes has a good claim to have been the first person to articulate this concept in its modern sense. The intention of Hobbes’s civil science was to lower the temperature of politics, and his concept of ‘the state’ does this by standing as a fictitious entity, distinct from both the rulers who hold office and the population over whom rule is exercised. Ironically, once this concept was combined with the later concept of ‘the nation’, producing ‘the nation-state’, the result has often been to raise the temperature of politics to catastrophic levels.

Director and Animator: Grant Harding

Writer and Producer: Dr Ryan Walter, Senior Lecturer in Political Economy, School of Political Science and International Studies, The University of Queensland