Chapter 19 Summary

According to Hobbes, human beings are in a state of fierce natural competition—Hobbes calls it war—with one another for the scarce goods of wealth, security, and honor. For peace and the prosperity that depends on it to be possible, the individual’s natural right to use his powers to preserve his life however he can (including by taking the lives of those others he perceives as threats) must be subject to limits. Hobbes thus concludes that each of us ought to be willing to forgo our natural right to all things and content ourselves with only so much liberty against others as we would allow them to have against ourselves. In the absence of this kind of contractual relation, guaranteed by some coercive force, human relations remain a “war of everyone against everyone,” in which “justice” and “injustice” have no meaning.