Nota bene: this is the third of a series of blog posts on “the paradox of politics”; footnotes are below the fold.

Is the paradox of politics, the central tension between law and liberty, soluble? Alas, the most popular solutions generally consist of empty clichés or trite rhetorical devices, such as the oxymoronic idea of “ordered liberty” [1] or the well-worn distinction between liberty (good) and license (bad). [2] Why are these incantations utterly useless? Because they are way too fuzzy in scope to be of much help. Simply put, they fail to spell out where, precisely, we should draw the line between law and liberty.

In place of these tired platitudes, let’s turn to some of the greatest Anglo-American minds in modern political philosophy, beginning with Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). His elegant but extreme solution to the law-liberty dilemma has two stages. (See especially chapters 13 to 30 of Hobbes’s 1651 treatise Leviathan, available here or here.) First, Hobbes imagines what life would be like in a pre-political state of nature, i.e. a world without any laws or government. Although men in this hypothetical condition enjoy absolute autonomy — what Hobbes’s calls “natural liberty”[3] — this freedom, to put it mildly, is a precarious one. In one of the most famous sentences of all time, Hobbes writes:

“In such condition [the state of nature] there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” (p. 179)

Next, Hobbes postulates a fictional covenant or “social contract” in which men agree to transfer their natural liberty to an absolute sovereign in exchange for protection:

“… men agree amongst themselves to submit to some man, or assembly of men, voluntarily, on confidence to be protected by him against all others. This latter may be called a political Commonwealth, or Commonwealth by Institution ….” (p. 190)

For Hobbes, we must collectively surrender our natural liberty to a strong central authority. Why? Because without an absolute sovereign or “Leviathan” with unlimited and indivisible power to punish wrongdoers, social life would soon descend into a brutish “war of every man, against every man” (p. 179). In short, we exchange liberty for safety.

Hobbes’s dark view of man — and his drawing of the law-liberty line in such a lopsided fashion — appears harsh, if not extreme. It is even tempting to dismiss this 17th-century political theorist as a proto-fascist, since his theory of politics can be used to justify dictatorships. But in fairness to Hobbes, he lived through some very tough and turbulent times: the English civil wars from 1642 to 1651, one of the most bloody and brutal periods in British history. According to Britain’s National Army Museum (see here or here), a larger proportion of the population in England, Wales, and Ireland were killed or maimed during the Civil Wars than in the First World War!

Yet, be that as it may, Hobbes’s approach to politics has a fatal flaw, one that is even more troubling than the law-liberty dilemma with which we began this series: the sovereign is supposed to protect us from each other, but who protects us from the sovereign? [4] Does this second-order Hobbesian paradox have a solution, or does the ghost of Thomas Hobbes continue to haunt us? Are all governments doomed to end in tyranny? (To be continued …)

[1] For a history of the origins of the expression “ordered liberty”, see pages 229-237 of Luke M. Milligan and Robert E. Ranney’s law review article on “Judicial Process, Free Speech, and Ordered Liberty”, published in the University of the Pacific Law Review, Vol. 56, No. 4 (2025), pp. 227-241.

[2] On the distinction between liberty and licentiousness, see John Calvin’s essay “On Civil Government” in his treatise On God and Political Duty, reprinted on pp. 173-175 of the second edition of Princeton Readings in Political Thought.

[3] Hobbes defines natural liberty as the right to do as one pleases: “The right of nature … is the liberty each man hath to use his own power as he will himself for the preservation of his own nature; that is to say, of his own life; and consequently, of doing anything which, in his own judgement and reason, he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto.” (Hobbes 2018 [1651], p. 180)

[4] Cf. Federalist Paper #51 (Madison).