A Reading of Hobbes’ Leviathan with Economists’ Glasses

Abstract

This work purposes to show the central role of Thomas Hobbes in the formation of capitalist ideology. He is the first author to present the ideology of the businessman (homo oecocomicus), with its most distinctive characteristic, individualism. Every constitutive element of the capitalist system is found in Hobbes’ writings. His mentality is bourgeois and uses a model that can only correspond to a mercantile society of capitalist character, in which political rights are less important than security in the market. The economic liberalism of Adam Smith inherits from Hobbes its individualistic basis and its chrematistic platform.