A. Chap. XVII starts with a useful recapitulation of Hobbes' argument:

1. Without political organization, the "naturall Passions of men" tend to a condition of war, in which the goals towards which these passions are directed, of "preservation" and "a more contented life," are actually frustrated.

2. So achieving these goals requires accepting "restraint."

3. But people won't restrain themselves except out of fear of a "visible Power."

An extra point: there needs to be political organization for protection against external threat as well as to avoid civil war.

B. This leads into an account of the "Generation" (origin) of the commonwealth (state): pp. 227-8. It isn't just that people need to renounce the unlimited right of nature; they need to transfer their power to "that great Leviathan," the state, which Hobbes in his Introduction (p. 81) pictures as "an Artificiall Man." This artificial person may be embodied in a single ordinary person (monarchy), or in the majority voice of an assembly. (Democracy? It depends on how the assembly is constituted. For all Hobbes says here, it might be, e.g., all the property owners, or all the people of aristocratic birth.) In either case, the artificial person "beareth the Person" of the parties to the covenant; that is, it speaks and acts for them (its speakings and doings count as theirs). Points to note:

1. For the purposes of Hobbes' argument, the specific shape of political institutions evidently doesn't matter (monarchy, democracy, aristocracy, …). Anything will do, so long as fulfills the necessary function.

2. The contract (covenant) is between the ordinary people, not between them and the "Artificiall Man." This leads to absolutism. If the state were a party to the contract, it would have obligations. But it isn't, and it doesn't.

3. "The only way to erect such a Common Power" (p. 227): this authoritarian political theory is supposed to have the same status as the laws of nature; that is, it's a theorem of the science of moral philosophy.

C. At p. 225 Hobbes concedes that there are creatures that are naturally sociable (e.g. bees and ants), but he insists that this isn't so with human beings. For Hobbes, sociableness in human beings is artificial as opposed to natural. (Even though reason, which discerns the necessity for the political construction, is presumably part of our nature. Individual human motivations, according to Hobbes, are essentially self-oriented. So the only way reason discerns for us to escape the horrors of the state of nature, according to him, is to set up an external power to channel those self-interested motivations, through fear, away from unrestricted aggressive competition. He has no room for natural motivations in the direction of, e.g., helpfulness.) Two points:

1. Hobbes says that "men are continually in competition for Honour and Dignity" (p. 225), and that man's "Joy consisteth in comparing himself with other men" (p. 226). The goals of the natural motivations that he sees as obstacles to peaceable social life are, in part, things whose being worth pursuing is intelligible only in a social context – social goods. This makes it hard for Hobbes to maintain his sharp separation between the natural and the social.

2. Consider other social animals, e.g. the great apes (our relatives). They have versions of what makes peaceable social life difficult for us, e.g. competitiveness. But peaceable social life is natural for them. The risks posed by aggressiveness are mostly defused by rank orders, ritualizing of conflicts, etc. Nature doesn't solve our parallel problems for us, as it solves theirs for them (instinct). No doubt Hobbes is right to this extent: that we need institutions to live together. But maybe our sociality makes a difference to our motivational makeup, in a way that Hobbes doesn't allow for.

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