CII.

"This is the First Edition of "Leviathan", 1651. This is about the idea that people are by nature evil, and we need an all powerful sovereign to avoid the state of war of everyone against everyone else — a powerful proposition.
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So what are the major themes of the book? First, about the theory of human nature. The second one is the relationship between nature and the theory of social contract. Hobbes is really the first of the contractarians, who advocates that what brings society together is a social contract.
If you want to understand society, you have to understand that we have contracts with each other. And then finally the theory of the sovereign. The major desire, the essence of Hobbes's work, is to try to find an identifiable sovereign. He lived in turbulent times when you did not know who the sovereign is. Is this the king? Is this the landlord? Are these the burghers? Is this the parliament? Who on earth is the sovereign? He wanted to find one identifiable sovereign — we can all agree, this is the proper source of law.
(...)
And the sovereign actually can be — and I just point out two words from this citation — can be transferred on one man, the king, or upon one assembly of man. That's, I think, extremely important. Though he was very strongly in favor of absolutism, he did consider that the sovereign can be a properly assembled body of man. But how they will be properly assembled, he doesn't have the faintest idea, or doesn't have the guts to say it. It will become much more clear in Locke, and particularly in Rousseau, where the sovereign is, and it becomes, of course, crystal clear in the American Constitution, which starts, "We the people." That's where the sovereign is. In Hobbes's time, it was not quite we the people, but he did consider that it may not be the royalty, the king."

© Iván Szelényi
Yale Lectures on Foundations of Modern Social Thought
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