Thomas Hobbes stands at the threshold of modern political thought, offering a vision of human relations that is neither Machiavellian nor Clausewitzian, yet essential for understanding both. His work forms the missing element in the axis that runs from Machiavelli’s political modulation, through Clausewitz’s dynamic field of conflict, to Schmitt’s metaphysics of sovereignty. Hobbes does not describe strategy, nor does he sacralise decision. Instead, he constructs the foundational ontology of political fear – the relational condition that precedes both action and authority.
Hobbes’s state of nature is not a historical hypothesis but a conceptual device. It reveals the structure of human relations when no stabilising field exists. In this condition, individuals are not driven by hostility but by vulnerability. Fear is not an emotion; it is the primary relational force. It shapes behaviour, expectations, and the emergence of authority. Hobbes’s insight is that political order arises not from virtue, nor from cunning, nor from decision, but from the modulation of fear. This makes him the earliest thinker of relational tension.
The Leviathan, Hobbes’s sovereign, is not a Schmittian figure of metaphysical decision. It is a relational construct – an artificial person created by the collective act of covenant. Its authority does not descend from transcendence but emerges from the distributed fear that binds individuals into a political field. Hobbes’s sovereign is therefore not above the field; it is the field’s condensation. This makes Hobbes fundamentally different from Schmitt, whose sovereign interrupts the field rather than embodying it.
Hobbes also differs from Machiavelli and Clausewitz in a crucial way. Machiavelli analyses how political agents modulate a field already in motion. Clausewitz analyses how conflict behaves within a field shaped by political aims. Hobbes, by contrast, describes the moment before modulation – the relational vacuum in which no field yet exists. His work reveals the ontological precondition for both politics and war: the human need for stability in the face of vulnerability. This makes Hobbes the missing element of the axis, the thinker who explains why fields arise at all.
Hobbes’s relevance to relational monism lies in his recognition that political order is not an essence but a configuration. It is not guaranteed by nature, nor by morality, nor by sovereignty. It is produced by the modulation of fear into stability. This modulation is fragile, contingent, and reversible. Hobbes’s world is not binary, as Schmitt’s is; nor is it strategic, as Clausewitz’s is; nor is it opportunistic, as Machiavelli’s is. It is relational in the deepest sense: political life emerges from the interplay of vulnerability, expectation, and collective construction.
In this light, Hobbes becomes the conceptual foundation upon which the rest of the axis stands. Machiavelli describes how agents act within a field; Clausewitz describes how conflict modulates the field; Schmitt describes how sovereignty claims to transcend the field. Hobbes describes why the field exists at all. His work reveals the relational origin of political order, the tension that precedes authority, and the vulnerability that makes modulation necessary. He is the missing element because he provides the ontological ground for both political action and political fear.
Placed within the broader framework of relational monism, Hobbes’s thought becomes newly legible. The Leviathan is not a metaphysical sovereign but a relational artefact. The state of nature is not chaos but a field without modulation. Fear is not hostility but the first relational force. Hobbes does not oppose relationality; he anticipates it. His work shows that political life begins not with decision, nor with conflict, nor with cunning, but with the human need to transform vulnerability into stability through collective relation.
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