Common-Wealth: Possible or Just a Good Idea?

Hobbes presents the idea that a common-wealth with ONE (and onely one) sovereign is the ideal way to ensure peace and common defense of a people. There are few rules for having a sovereign – basically the populace, individually, must give up their natural rights (to kill other people and work for their own gain and dominance, excepting only their right to self-defense) and trust that everyone else will do the same. Each person must agree that the majority will rule in all matters, and they must also pledge allegiance to the sovereign, who, amongst other things, is responsible for law-making, settling affairs, and equally and fairly distributing everything to his people. Simply put, everyone must buy into the idea of one all-powerful (and feared) leader, and must not, under any circumstances, try to dethrone him, try him under the law, or undermine him in any way. But can people truely be this uniform in their beliefs and actions?

What does this sound like? Everyone treated equally, one uncontestable person with all the power and means of justice (because, although Hobbes does define the sovereign as a person or several people working for one cause, he specifically recommends leader – on his list of common-wealth deal breakers, he lists: “That the sovraign Power may be divided” (165)), “common/shared” wealth…sounds an awful lot like the skewed notion of communism/totalitarianism that dominated parts of the world throughout the Twentieth Century. To use a comparison that Hobbes would have HATED, creating a common-wealth, or a communistic nation, requires that every person buy into the ideals presented or it will fail, in the same way that, when making fudge, only when every single grain of sugar is melted will the fudge set with perfect fudgieness: one unmelted crystal will create a lattice throughout all the other crystals and the fudge will be ruined, just as one person not committing himself to the common good creates doubt and destroys the trust upon which the common-wealth is founded. Hobbes leaves no room for the real idea of revolution. The only solution that Hobbes has to this problem is fear of the power of the sovereign, who is in place just to ensure that men will keep their social contracts, the promises that keep men out of warre. This one leader, completely unbiased and not power-hungry (like the communist leaders of yore), would make it worthwhile for men to buy into the common-wealth by making sure they all had just what they needed - peace, food, shared rivers, etc.

How practical is it, though, to imagine this one person, so selfless and invested in his subjects, when the only examples of common-wealth sovereignty in recent history have so quickly fallen into corruption? Perhaps isolation of the common-wealth is the necessity for such a Hobbesian sovereign. That would ensure limited education of the subjects (whose minds are "like clean paper, fit to recieve whatsoever by Publique Authority shall be imprinted in them (171)"), which would prevent the introduction of new ideas, thus preventing the threat of revolt. With our current state of borderless communications, I think the ideals such a society would have to uphold would be absolutely unattainable because there would be so many exterior inspirations for revolution. Hobbes presents an unarguable ideal that, I’m sure, would be nice to be a part of, but completely impossible to maintain unless it was in complete isolation (read: not so much an applicable form of government).