A Tale Of A Tub

The narrator states that the Church and the State are uneasy about the numerous critics of the institutions. They have used pamphlets and other types of writings to dissuade the public from believing their critiques. The critics convene and discuss the parable of a whale and a tub. When a whale endangers a ship, the sailors throw a tub overboard to distract the giant mammal. The men at the meeting begin to compare the whale to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. Leviathan was a work from 1651 that highlighted the idea of a “social contract” between a ruler and the ruled, meaning that in exchange for protection from a ruler, the people give up all their rights. However, Hobbes did not believe in the divine right of kings and suggested that the person to whom the people would contract with could be any ruler with whom the people could unite under. In the allegory in A Tale of a Tub, the whale becomes the Leviathan—a behemoth with many united within it against the status quo. The ship is the British Commonwealth, and the tub is thrown out to distract the whale or Leviathan from tipping the ship.