The sovereign would make and enforce the laws to secure a peaceful society, making life, liberty, and property possible. Hobbes believed that a government headed by a king was the best form that the sovereign could take. Placing all power in the hands of a king would mean more resolute and consistent exercise of political authority, Hobbes argued.
Hobbes also maintained that the social contract was an agreement only among the people and not between them and their king. Once the people had given absolute power to the king, they had no right to revolt against him.
He feared religion could become a source of civil war. In any conflict between divine and royal law, Hobbes wrote, the individual should obey the king or choose death. But the days of absolute kings were numbered.
A new age with fresh ideas was emerging—the European Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers wanted to improve human conditions on earth rather than concern themselves with religion and the afterlife.
Enlightenment philosophers John Locke, Charles Montesquieu, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau all developed theories of government in which some or even all the people would govern. These thinkers had a profound effect on the American and French revolutions and the democratic governments that they produced. John Locke — was born shortly before the English Civil War. Locke studied science and medicine at Oxford University and became a professor there. This event reduced the power of the king and made Parliament the major authority in English government.
In , Locke published his Two Treatises of Government. He generally agreed with Hobbes about the brutality of the state of nature, which required a social contract to assure peace.
But he disagreed with Hobbes on two major points. First, Locke argued that natural rights such as life, liberty, and property existed in the state of nature and could never be taken away or even voluntarily given up by individuals. Locke also disagreed with Hobbes about the social contract.
For him, it was not just an agreement among the people, but between them and the sovereign preferably a king. According to Locke, the natural rights of individuals limited the power of the king. The king did not hold absolute power, as Hobbes had said, but acted only to enforce and protect the natural rights of the people. If a sovereign violated these rights, the social contract was broken, and the people had the right to revolt and establish a new government.
Although Locke spoke out for freedom of thought, speech, and religion, he believed property to be the most important natural right. He declared that owners may do whatever they want with their property as long as they do not invade the rights of others.
Locke favored a representative government such as the English Parliament, which had a hereditary House of Lords and an elected House of Commons. But he wanted representatives to be only men of property and business.
Consequently, only adult male property owners should have the right to vote. Locke was reluctant to allow the propertyless masses of people to participate in government because he believed that they were unfit. The executive prime minister and courts would be creations of the legislature and under its authority.
Montesquieu was born into a noble family and educated in the law. He traveled extensively throughout Europe, including England, where he studied the Parliament. Montesquieu published his greatest work, The Spirit of the Laws , in Unlike Hobbes and Locke, Montesquieu believed that in the state of nature individuals were so fearful that they avoided violence and war.
The need for food, Montesquieu said, caused the timid humans to associate with others and seek to live in a society. Montesquieu did not describe a social contract as such. But he said that the state of war among individuals and nations led to human laws and government.
Montesquieu wrote that the main purpose of government is to maintain law and order, political liberty, and the property of the individual. Montesquieu opposed the absolute monarchy of his home country and favored the English system as the best model of government. Montesquieu somewhat misinterpreted how political power was actually exercised in England. When he wrote The Spirit of the Laws , power was concentrated pretty much in Parliament, the national legislature.
Montesquieu thought he saw a separation and balancing of the powers of government in England. What could be clearer? First, quite simply, it represents a false view of human nature. People do all sorts of altruistic things that go against their interests. They also do all sorts of needlessly cruel things that go against self-interest think of the self-defeating lengths that revenge can run to. So it would be uncharitable to interpret Hobbes this way, if we can find a more plausible account in his work.
Second, in any case Hobbes often relies on a more sophisticated view of human nature. He describes or even relies on motives that go beyond or against self-interest, such as pity, a sense of honor or courage, and so on. And he frequently emphasizes that we find it difficult to judge or appreciate just what our interests are anyhow. The upshot is that Hobbes does not think that we are basically or reliably selfish; and he does not think we are fundamentally or reliably rational in our ideas about what is in our interests.
He is rarely surprised to find human beings doing things that go against self-interest: we will cut off our noses to spite our faces, we will torture others for their eternal salvation, we will charge to our deaths for love of country.
In fact, a lot of the problems that befall human beings, according to Hobbes, result from their being too little concerned with self-interest. This weakness as regards our self-interest has even led some to think that Hobbes is advocating a theory known as ethical egoism. This is to claim that Hobbes bases morality upon self-interest, claiming that we ought to do what it is most in our interest to do.
But we shall see that this would over-simplify the conclusions that Hobbes draws from his account of human nature. We are needy and vulnerable. We are easily led astray in our attempts to know the world around us. Our capacity to reason is as fragile as our capacity to know; it relies upon language and is prone to error and undue influence.
What is the political fate of this rather pathetic sounding creature—that is, of us? Unsurprisingly, Hobbes thinks little happiness can be expected of our lives together. The best we can hope for is peaceful life under an authoritarian-sounding sovereign. He claims that the only authority that naturally exists among human beings is that of a mother over her child, because the child is so very much weaker than the mother and indebted to her for its survival.
Among adult human beings this is invariably not the case. Hobbes concedes an obvious objection, admitting that some of us are much stronger than others. And although he is very sarcastic about the idea that some are wiser than others, he does not have much difficulty with the idea that some are fools and others are dangerously cunning.
Nonetheless, it is almost invariably true that every human being is capable of killing any other. Leviathan , xiii. He is strongly opposing arguments that established monarchs have a natural or God-given right to rule over us. It could occur tomorrow in every modern society, for example, if the police and army suddenly refused to do their jobs on behalf of government.
Why should peaceful cooperation be impossible without an overarching authority? Hobbes provides a series of powerful arguments that suggest it is extremely unlikely that human beings will live in security and peaceful cooperation without government. Anarchism , the thesis that we should live without government, of course disputes these arguments. His most basic argument is threefold. This is a more difficult argument than it might seem. Hobbes does not suppose that we are all selfish, that we are all cowards, or that we are all desperately concerned with how others see us.
Two points, though. Moreover, many of these people will be prepared to use violence to attain their ends—especially if there is no government or police to stop them. In this Hobbes is surely correct. Second, in some situations it makes good sense, at least in the short term, to use violence and to behave selfishly, fearfully or vaingloriously. If our lives seem to be at stake, after all, we are unlikely to have many scruples about stealing a loaf of bread; if we perceive someone as a deadly threat, we may well want to attack first, while his guard is down; if we think that there are lots of potential attackers out there, it is going to make perfect sense to get a reputation as someone who should not be messed with.
Underlying this most basic argument is an important consideration about insecurity. As we shall see Hobbes places great weight on contracts thus some interpreters see Hobbes as heralding a market society dominated by contractual exchanges.
In the state of nature such agreements are not going to work. Only the weakest will have good reason to perform the second part of a covenant, and then only if the stronger party is standing over them.
Yet a huge amount of human cooperation relies on trust, that others will return their part of the bargain over time.
A similar point can be made about property, most of which we cannot carry about with us and watch over. This means we must rely on others respecting our possessions over extended periods of time.
One can reasonably object to such points: Surely there are basic duties to reciprocate fairly and to behave in a trustworthy manner? Even if there is no government providing a framework of law, judgment and punishment, do not most people have a reasonable sense of what is right and wrong, which will prevent the sort of contract-breaking and generalized insecurity that Hobbes is concerned with?
Indeed, should not our basic sense of morality prevent much of the greed, pre-emptive attack and reputation-seeking that Hobbes stressed in the first place? He makes two claims. The second follows from this, and is less often noticed: it concerns the danger posed by our different and variable judgments of what is right and wrong. Naturally speaking—that is, outside of civil society — we have a right to do whatever we think will ensure our self-preservation. The worst that can happen to us is violent death at the hands of others.
If we have any rights at all, if as we might put it nature has given us any rights whatsoever, then the first is surely this: the right to prevent violent death befalling us. But Hobbes says more than this, and it is this point that makes his argument so powerful. We do not just have a right to ensure our self-preservation: we each have a right to judge what will ensure our self-preservation.
Hobbes has given us good reasons to think that human beings rarely judge wisely. Yet in the state of nature no one is in a position to successfully define what is good judgment. Others might judge the matter differently, of course. Almost certainly you will have quite a different view of things perhaps you were just stretching your arms, not raising a musket to shoot me. Because we are all insecure, because trust is more-or-less absent, there is little chance of our sorting out misunderstandings peacefully, nor can we rely on some trusted third party to decide whose judgment is right.
We all have to be judges in our own causes, and the stakes are very high indeed: life or death. For this reason Hobbes makes very bold claims that sound totally amoral. Hobbes is dramatizing his point, but the core is defensible. New readers of Hobbes often suppose that the state of nature would be a much nicer place, if only he were to picture human beings with some basic moral ideas. Some think that Hobbes is imagining human beings who have no idea of social interaction and therefore no ideas about right and wrong.
In this case, the natural condition would be a purely theoretical construction, and would demonstrate what both government and society do for human beings. A famous statement about the state of nature in De Cive viii. Others suppose that Hobbes has a much more complex picture of human motivation, so that there is no reason to think moral ideas are absent in the state of nature. The problem here is not a lack of moral ideas—far from it — rather that moral ideas and judgments differ enormously.
This means for example that two people who are fighting tooth and nail over a cow or a gun can both think they are perfectly entitled to the object and both think they are perfectly right to kill the other—a point Hobbes makes explicitly and often. It also enables us to see that many Hobbesian conflicts are about religious ideas or political ideals as well as self-preservation and so on —as in the British Civil War raging while Hobbes wrote Leviathan , and in the many violent sectarian conflicts throughout the world today.
But what sort of ought is this? There are two basic ways of interpreting Hobbes here. This line of thought fits well with an egoistic reading of Hobbes, but it faces serious problems, as will be seen. The other way of interpreting Hobbes is not without problems either. This takes Hobbes to be saying that we ought, morally speaking, to avoid the state of nature.
We have a duty to do what we can to avoid this situation arising, and a duty to end it, if at all possible. Hobbes often makes his view clear, that we have such moral obligations. But then two difficult questions arise: Why these obligations? And why are they obligatory? Hobbes frames the issues in terms of an older vocabulary, using the idea of natural law that many ancient and medieval philosophers had relied on.
Like them, he thinks that human reason can discern some eternal principles to govern our conduct. These principles are independent of though also complementary to whatever moral instruction we might get from God or religion. In other words, they are laws given by nature rather than revealed by God. But Hobbes makes radical changes to the content of these so-called laws of nature. In particular, he does not think that natural law provides any scope whatsoever to criticize or disobey the actual laws made by a government.
He thus disagrees with those Protestants who thought that religious conscience might sanction disobedience of immoral laws, and with Catholics who thought that the commandments of the Pope have primacy over those of national political authorities. Although he sets out nineteen laws of nature, it is the first two that are politically crucial. The remaining sixteen can be quite simply encapsulated in the formula, do as you would be done by.
While the details are important for scholars of Hobbes, they do not affect the overall theory and will be ignored here. Every man ought to endeavor peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it, and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war.
Leviathan , xiv. This repeats the points we have already seen about our right of nature , so long as peace does not appear to be a realistic prospect. The second law of nature is more complicated:. That a man be willing, when others are so too, as far-forth as for peace and defense of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things, and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself.
What Hobbes tries to tackle here is the transition from the state of nature to civil society. But how he does this is misleading and has generated much confusion and disagreement.
But the problem is obvious. If the state of nature is anything like as bad as Hobbes has argued, then there is just no way people could ever make an agreement like this or put it into practice. That is: governments have invariably been foisted upon people by force and fraud, not by collective agreement.
His basic claim is that we should behave as if we had voluntarily entered into such a contract with everyone else in our society—everyone else, that is, except the sovereign authority.
How limited this right of nature becomes in civil society has caused much dispute, because deciding what is an immediate threat is a question of judgment. It certainly permits us to fight back if the sovereign tries to kill us. Game theorists have been particularly active in these debates, experimenting with different models for the state of nature and the conflict it engenders.
Hobbes argues that the state of nature is a miserable state of war in which none of our important human ends are reliably realizable. Happily, human nature also provides resources to escape this miserable condition.
Humans will recognize as imperatives the injunction to seek peace, and to do those things necessary to secure it, when they can do so safely. They forbid many familiar vices such as iniquity, cruelty, and ingratitude. Although commentators do not agree on whether these laws should be regarded as mere precepts of prudence, or rather as divine commands, or moral imperatives of some other sort, all agree that Hobbes understands them to direct people to submit to political authority.
The social covenant involves both the renunciation or transfer of right and the authorization of the sovereign power. Political legitimacy depends not on how a government came to power, but only on whether it can effectively protect those who have consented to obey it; political obligation ends when protection ceases.
Although Hobbes offered some mild pragmatic grounds for preferring monarchy to other forms of government, his main concern was to argue that effective government—whatever its form—must have absolute authority. Its powers must be neither divided nor limited. The powers of legislation, adjudication, enforcement, taxation, war-making and the less familiar right of control of normative doctrine are connected in such a way that a loss of one may thwart effective exercise of the rest; for example, legislation without interpretation and enforcement will not serve to regulate conduct.
Similarly, to impose limitation on the authority of the government is to invite irresoluble disputes over whether it has overstepped those limits. If each person is to decide for herself whether the government should be obeyed, factional disagreement—and war to settle the issue, or at least paralysis of effective government—are quite possible.
To avoid the horrible prospect of governmental collapse and return to the state of nature, people should treat their sovereign as having absolute authority. He argues that subjects retain a right of self-defense against the sovereign power, giving them the right to disobey or resist when their lives are in danger. He also gives them seemingly broad resistance rights in cases in which their families or even their honor are at stake. These exceptions have understandably intrigued those who study Hobbes.
It is not clear whether or not this charge can stand up to scrutiny, but it will surely be the subject of much continued discussion. Hobbes progressively expands his discussion of Christian religion in each revision of his political philosophy, until it comes in Leviathan to comprise roughly half the book. There is no settled consensus on how Hobbes understands the significance of religion within his political theory. Scholars are increasingly interested in how Hobbes thought of the status of women, and of the family.
Hobbes was one of the earliest western philosophers to count women as persons when devising a social contract among persons. He insists on the equality of all people, very explicitly including women. People are equal because they are all subject to domination, and all potentially capable of dominating others.
No person is so strong as to be invulnerable to attack while sleeping by the concerted efforts of others, nor is any so strong as to be assured of dominating all others. In this relevant sense, women are naturally equal to men. They are equally naturally free, meaning that their consent is required before they will be under the authority of anyone else. He witnesses the Amazons. In seeming contrast to this egalitarian foundation, Hobbes spoke of the commonwealth in patriarchal language.
Hobbes justifies this way of talking by saying that it is fathers not mothers who have founded societies. Such debates raise the question: To what extent are the patriarchal claims Hobbes makes integral to his overall theory, if indeed they are integral at all? Very helpful for further reference is the critical bibliography of Hobbes scholarship to contained in Zagorin, P.
Major Political Writings 2. The Philosophical Project 3. The State of Nature 4. Further Questions About the State of Nature 6. The Laws of Nature 7. Establishing Sovereign Authority 8. Absolutism 9. Responsibility and the Limits of Political Obligation Religion and Social Instability The Philosophical Project Hobbes sought to discover rational principles for the construction of a civil polity that would not be subject to destruction from within.
The State of Nature To establish these conclusions, Hobbes invites us to consider what life would be like in a state of nature, that is, a condition without government.
The State of Nature Is a State of War Taken together, these plausible descriptive and normative assumptions yield a state of nature potentially fraught with divisive struggle. Further Questions About the State of Nature In response to the natural question whether humanity ever was generally in any such state of nature, Hobbes gives three examples of putative states of nature.
The Laws of Nature Hobbes argues that the state of nature is a miserable state of war in which none of our important human ends are reliably realizable. Absolutism Although Hobbes offered some mild pragmatic grounds for preferring monarchy to other forms of government, his main concern was to argue that effective government—whatever its form—must have absolute authority. Hobbes on Women and the Family Scholars are increasingly interested in how Hobbes thought of the status of women, and of the family.
Collections Brown, K. Taylor, J. Watkins, Howard Warrender, and John Plamenatz, among others. Caws, P. Courtland, S. Dietz, M. Dyzenhaus, D. Poole eds.
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