Hobbes’s Leviathan theorized the political form needed by property-accumulating bourgeoisie.

Evidence

It would be erroneous to take at its face value the obvious inconsistency between Hobbes’s plea for security of the individual and the inherent instability of his Commonwealth. Here again he tries to persuade, to appeal to certain basic instincts for security which he knew well enough could survive in the subjects of the Leviathan only in the form of absolute submission to the power which “over-awes them all,” that is, in an all-pervading, overwhelming fear—not exactly the basic sentiment of a safe man. What Hobbes actually starts from is an unmatched insight into the political needs of the new social body of the rising bourgeoisie, whose fundamental belief in an unending process of property accumulation was about to eliminate all individual safety. Hobbes drew the necessary conclusions from social and economic behavior patterns when he proposed his revolutionary changes in political constitution. He outlined the only new body politic which could correspond to the new needs and interests of a new class. What he actually achieved was a picture of man as he ought to become and ought to behave if he wanted to fit into the coming bourgeois society. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 391

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes Arendt’s reading of Hobbes as blueprint for bourgeois polity, a scaffolding concept for understanding how totalitarian political form grew out of class interests.
• XREF: Connects to Arendt’s broader chapter argument that imperialism and totalitarianism continue bourgeois accumulation politics; links forward to the Islamophobia module’s treatment of how political forms serve class/colonial interests.