“To Make Men Believe Their Rebellion Just”: Thomas Hobbes and the Study of Civil War

Thomas Hobbes’s political philosophy occupies a central place within civil war research and has inspired a prominent approach to conflict onset focused on sovereign authority’s breakdown. Yet this work rarely draws on Hobbes as an analyst of the English Civil War (1642–1651), chronicled in Behemoth (1681). What does this more historical work show about the causes of civil war? How does it compare to the theoretical insights conflict scholars derive from Hobbes’s philosophy? We rethink Hobbes’s thought within conflict research, arguing that his account of the English Civil War provides a complex causal process in which ideas and meanings bridge the disjuncture between elite and mass actors: top-down ideological overtures reshape the material foundations of individuals’ incentives to rebel. At the same time, mass actors interpret and render meaningful these claims based on existing beliefs and predispositions, spurring emotional responses conducive to taking up arms. These insights highlight the need to re-examine conventional analytical categories in studies of civil war and deploy temporally sensitive strategies for explaining conflict evolution.