Both break politics away from theology, and both are read as apologists for power. Both readings are wrong in the same way: each is describing what politics must do given a premise about human beings, and the premise is the argument.
This is chapter 11 of the PSIR Optional Notes, from the part on Western Political Thought in the Paper I syllabus. The complete book is a free download.
UPSC syllabus
Western Political Thought: Machiavelli, Hobbes.
In one page
- Machiavelli separates politics from morality and religion. The question is not what a ruler ought to be but what preserves the state, and the criterion of judgement is effectiveness.
- Virtù is the capacity to act decisively and adapt; fortuna is the half of affairs beyond control. Their interaction is his theory of political success.
- The Prince (1513) advises the founder of a new state; the Discourses on Livy (1531) argue that a republic with an armed citizenry and productive internal conflict is the more durable form. Reading only the first produces a caricature.
- Hobbes builds politics as a deductive science from materialist premises. Human beings are matter in motion, driven by appetite and aversion, and above all by the fear of violent death.
- The state of nature is a state of war of every man against every man: no industry, no culture, no society, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
- The laws of nature are prudential theorems, not moral commands. The first is to seek peace; the second is to lay down the right to all things provided others do likewise.
- The covenant is made among subjects, not with the sovereign, so the sovereign is not a party to it, cannot breach it, and cannot be forfeited. Sovereignty must be absolute, undivided and perpetual.
- Hobbes’s absolutism has a liberal core: the sovereign exists to protect life, obligation ends when protection ends, and the individual with rights, not the community, is the starting point.
Machiavelli
Thinker
Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527)
Key works. The Prince (written 1513, published 1532), Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius (1531), The Art of War (1521)
Core claim. Politics is an autonomous domain with its own logic. A ruler who acts as morality prescribes among people who do not will be destroyed, so the ruler must learn how not to be good and use that knowledge according to necessity. The measure of an action is whether it preserves the state.
Standard critique. He supplies no criterion for what the state is preserved for, so the doctrine is available to any regime; and the claim of political autonomy dissolves the ground on which tyranny could be condemned.
Exam hook. The founder of modern political realism and the origin of reason of state. In Paper II, he is the ancestor of the realist tradition in international relations, Chapter 34.
The break with the tradition
Before Machiavelli, political writing in the Christian West was a branch of moral philosophy: the mirror for princes genre told rulers how a good ruler behaves. Machiavelli’s declared innovation is to go to the effectual truth of the matter rather than to its imagination, because so many have imagined republics and principalities that were never seen, and one who abandons what is done for what ought to be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation.
Three consequences follow. Politics becomes autonomous, judged by its own standard of success rather than by theology. Method becomes empirical and historical, drawing on Roman history and on his own diplomatic observation. And morality becomes instrumental: the ruler must know how to enter into evil when necessity commands, which is not the same as being told that evil is good.
Human nature, virtù and fortuna
His premise is a low and constant estimate of human beings: ungrateful, fickle, deceitful, cowardly and covetous, so that a ruler who relies on their promises is undone. Because this is constant, history repeats and can be studied for lessons.
Virtù is the ruler’s answering quality. It is not moral virtue but energy, decisiveness, foresight and above all the capacity to adapt one’s conduct to the times. Fortuna is chance, which he estimates governs roughly half of our actions, leaving the other half to us; his images are of the river that must be embanked before the flood, and of fortune as a woman who yields to the bold. The point of the pairing is that success comes from matching one’s disposition to the moment, and that men fail because their natures are inflexible.
Related doctrines to name: whether it is better to be loved or feared, where he concludes it is safer to be feared provided one avoids being hated, which requires leaving subjects’ property and women alone; the lion and the fox, force and cunning, both necessary; and cruelty well used, meaning inflicted once, decisively, and for security, as against cruelty that grows over time.
The republican Machiavelli
The Discourses (1531) are the corrective to The Prince (1513) and the reason Machiavelli belongs to the republican tradition rather than to apologetics for tyranny.
- A republic is more durable than a principality, because it can adapt through many minds rather than one, and the people are better guardians of liberty than the nobles, being less ambitious and wanting only not to be oppressed.
- Conflict is productive. The tumults between the plebs and the senate in Rome were not the republic’s disease but the cause of its liberty, since they produced the tribunate and the laws. This is a genuinely original claim: almost every earlier writer treated internal conflict as pure pathology.
- Civic virtue and an armed citizenry sustain the free state; mercenaries are useless and dangerous, and a state that hires its defence has already lost the disposition that keeps it free.
- Corruption is the loss of that disposition, and a corrupt people cannot maintain a republic. Periodic return to first principles is the only remedy.
The reconciliation usually offered, and worth stating: The Prince (1513) addresses the exceptional situation of founding or rescuing a state, where one-man rule and extraordinary means may be necessary; the Discourses (1531) address the ordinary condition of maintaining a free one, where law and civic virtue govern. Rousseau’s remark that The Prince (1513) is the book of republicans is the sharpest version of this reading.
Hobbes
Thinker
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679)
Key works. Leviathan (1651), De Cive (1642), The Elements of Law (1640)
Core claim. From materialist premises about human motion and appetite, and from the equality of the ability to kill, the state of nature is necessarily a state of war. Reason therefore dictates a covenant by which every man authorises a sovereign, whose power must be absolute, undivided and perpetual because any limit reintroduces the private judgement that made the war.
Standard critique. Sovereignty is absolute yet founded on individual consent, which sits awkwardly; his subjects retain a right of self-preservation that logically permits resistance at the very moment resistance is forbidden; and the state of nature is a device, not a history.
Exam hook. The origin of modern social contract theory, of political obligation as a problem, and of sovereignty as a concept. Also the base of realism’s anarchy assumption in Chapter 34.
Method and human nature
Hobbes is the first to attempt politics as a deductive science on the model of geometry. He begins with matter in motion, moves to sensation and appetite, then to human psychology, then to the state. Human beings are not naturally social; they seek what they call good, meaning what they desire, and shun what they call evil, and there is no summum bonum or final end in which the mind can rest. Felicity is a continual progress of desire from one object to another, so there is a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, ceasing only in death.
Three sources of quarrel follow: competition for gain, diffidence for safety, and glory for reputation.
The state of nature as a state of war
UPSC asked for this directly in 2023 and the answer needs the argument, not the famous phrase alone.
- Equality. Men are roughly equal in body and mind, and crucially the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest by secret machination or confederacy. Equality of ability breeds equality of hope in attaining ends.
- Scarcity and anticipation. If two desire the same thing which they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies. The rational response is to strike first, so anticipation is prudent, and the prudence of each makes all less safe.
- No common power. Without a power to keep all in awe, there is no arbiter, so every man is judge in his own cause.
- Therefore war. War consists not in actual fighting but in the known disposition to it during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary, as foul weather lies not in a shower or two but in an inclination of many days.
- The consequences. No industry, culture, navigation, building, arts, letters or society; and worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, with the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
- No justice. Where there is no common power there is no law, and where no law, no injustice. Force and fraud are the two cardinal virtues in war. Notions of right and wrong have no place, which is a claim about the conditions of morality, not a denial of it.
Hobbes concedes the state of nature may never have existed generally over all the world, and offers the relation between sovereign states as the standing instance. That concession is the answer to the objection that it is bad anthropology: it is an analytical device isolating what the absence of a common power entails, not a historical claim.
Laws of nature, covenant and sovereign
The laws of nature are theorems discovered by reason about what conserves life; they oblige in conscience always but in action only where there is security that others will comply. The first is to seek peace and follow it. The second is to be willing, when others are so too, to lay down the right to all things and be contented with so much liberty against others as one would allow others against oneself. The third is that men perform their covenants made, which Hobbes calls the fountain of justice.
The covenant has a precise and consequential form. It is made by each with each, that they will authorise a common sovereign and own his actions as their own. The sovereign is therefore not a party to the contract. Three results follow directly, and they are what an answer must state: the sovereign can commit no injustice against subjects, since they are the authors of his acts; sovereignty cannot be forfeited by breach, because there is no covenant he could breach; and it cannot be divided, because divided sovereignty means competing judgements, which is the state of nature returning.
Hobbes is indifferent as between monarchy, aristocracy and democracy in principle, though he prefers monarchy on practical grounds of unity and secrecy. What matters is that sovereignty be absolute, undivided and perpetual, wherever it is located.
The liberal core of the absolutism
An answer that leaves Hobbes as a defender of despotism is incomplete. Four features point the other way.
- The individual is the starting point, with the state constructed for individual ends. There is no organic community, no natural hierarchy, no divine right.
- The purpose is the protection of life, and the mutual relation between obedience and protection is the whole reason for sovereignty: when protection ceases, obligation ceases.
- The right of self-preservation is inalienable. A subject may refuse to kill himself, to confess, or to serve in war where a substitute is possible, and a condemned man may resist his executioners.
- Liberty exists in the silence of the laws, and Hobbes expects that silence to be wide. The sovereign has no reason to regulate what does not endanger peace.
| Hobbes | Locke | Rousseau | |
|---|---|---|---|
| State of nature | State of war; no justice | Inconvenient but governed by natural law | Peaceful, solitary, non-moral; corrupted by society |
| Human nature | Appetitive, fearful, competitive | Rational, mostly cooperative | Naturally good; amour de soi, not amour propre |
| Rights surrendered | All except self-preservation | Only the executive power of the law of nature | All, to the community as a whole |
| Sovereign | Absolute, not a party to the contract | Fiduciary; the legislature holds a trust | The people; the general will, inalienable |
| Right of resistance | None, except to save one’s own life | Yes, on breach of trust | Question does not arise; the people are sovereign |
| Legacy | Sovereignty, obligation, realism | Constitutionalism, liberalism, 1688 and 1776 | Democracy, and Talmon’s totalitarian democracy charge |
Debate: Is Hobbes an authoritarian or the first liberal?
Authoritarian. The conclusion is unlimited sovereign power: no separation of powers, no right of resistance, no independent church, censorship justified, and the subject’s obedience owed regardless of the sovereign’s conduct. Whatever the premises, a theory is judged by what it licenses, and this licenses everything. The first liberal. The premises are radically individualist and the conclusion is instrumental: the state exists to protect individuals, has no other purpose, and forfeits obedience when it fails. Rights are pre-political, obligation is grounded in consent rather than in nature or God, and liberty is wide in the silence of the law. Every subsequent liberal argument accepts this architecture and merely disputes how much power the protection requires. The examiner’s line. He is an authoritarian in conclusion and a liberal in method, and the method proved more influential than the conclusion. Say precisely where the two part company: Locke accepts the individualist premises and rejects the absolutist inference by denying that the state of nature is a state of war. The disagreement is empirical, about how bad the alternative is, which is why it is settled differently by each generation.
The life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651
Covenants, without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651
It is much safer to be feared than loved, if one of the two has to be wanting
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513
Where answers lose marks
- Treating Machiavelli as an immoralist. His claim is that political action has consequences for which the ruler is responsible, which is a moral position, not the absence of one.
- Writing on Machiavelli from The Prince (1513) alone. The Discourses (1531) are republican, and the contrast is the examinable point.
- Confusing virtù with virtue. Virtù is efficacy and adaptability, and may require conduct that virtue forbids.
- Quoting “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” without the derivation. Equality of ability, scarcity, anticipation and the absence of a common power are the argument; the phrase is only its conclusion.
- Saying Hobbes’s subjects contract with the sovereign. They contract with each other, which is exactly why the sovereign cannot breach the covenant.
- Presenting Hobbes as a defender of divine right. He is its opponent: authority rests on consent and on the protection it delivers, not on descent or divinity.
Asked before
- State of Nature as State of War (Hobbes). (2023, Paper I, 10 marks)
- Locke’s views on Revolution. (2024, Paper I, 10 marks)
Answer skeleton
State of Nature as State of War (Hobbes). (10 marks, 150 words)
Frame. One line on function: the state of nature is an analytical device isolating what follows from the absence of a common power, not a historical claim. Hobbes says so himself.
The derivation, compressed. Rough equality of ability, including the ability to kill; scarcity, so that two desiring one thing become enemies; the rationality of anticipation; and no common power, so each is judge in his own cause.
The definition of war. Not continual fighting but the known disposition to it during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. Use the foul-weather image.
Consequences. No industry, culture or society; continual fear; and no justice, since where there is no common power there is no law, and where no law, no injustice.
Close on what it is for. It generates the laws of nature and therefore the covenant. Add the standing instance Hobbes offers, sovereign states in relation to each other, which is why the passage founds realism in international relations.
Last-mile revision
- Machiavelli: effectual truth; autonomy of politics; virtù and fortuna, fortune governs half; loved or feared, avoid being hated; lion and fox; cruelty well used.
- Discourses (1531): republics more durable; the people better guardians of liberty; conflict between plebs and senate productive; civic virtue, armed citizenry, corruption, return to first principles.
- Hobbes’s method: deductive, materialist, matter in motion; no summum bonum; restless desire of power after power.
- Three causes of quarrel: competition, diffidence, glory. Four steps to war: equality, scarcity and anticipation, no common power, hence the disposition to fight.
- Laws of nature as prudential theorems: seek peace; lay down the right to all things when others do; perform covenants made.
- Covenant is among subjects, not with the sovereign; hence no injustice by the sovereign, no forfeiture, no division of sovereignty.
- The liberal core: individualist premises, protection as purpose, obedience tied to protection, inalienable self-preservation, liberty in the silence of the laws.
- Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau differ first on the state of nature; everything else follows.
Read the rest. This chapter is one of 58 in the complete PSIR Optional Notes, covering Paper I and Paper II in full — free to download.
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