Hobbes on Civic Liberty and the Rule of Law

Hobbes is often cited as a precursor of modern liberalism, both on the grounds of his individualism and of his endorsement of intellectual and moral autonomy. Yet Hobbes supports absolutist government rather than democracy. This is partly explained by his rejection of autonomy understood as self-government. But Hobbes's case against democracy is more comprehensive than this. This article considers Hobbes's case against democracy.

Representations, 2009

Hobbes Studies, 2022

This article identifies an argument in Hobbes’s writings often overlooked but relevant to current philosophical debates. Political philosophers tend to categorize his thought as representing consent or rescue theories of political authority. Though these interpretations have textual support and are understandable, they leave out one of his most compelling arguments—what we call the lesser evil argument for political authority, expressed most explicitly in Chapter 20 of Leviathan. Hobbes frankly admits the state’s evils but appeals to the significant disparity between those evils and the greater evils outside the state as a basis for political authority. More than a passing observation, aspects of the lesser evil argument appear in each of his three major political works. In addition to outlining this argument, the article examines its significance both for Hobbes scholarship and recent philosophical debates on political authority.

UCAC, 2024

The History of Philosophy is characterized by the search for philosophical solutions to the problems that confront humanity. One of such problems is the question of sovereignty which constitutes the bedrock of present-day discourse in political philosophy. Political philosophy begins with the question: what ought to be a person’s relationship to society? The discussion of sovereignty is indispensable inasmuch as there are a people who ought to be governed. This is because human beings, as “political animals”, are surrounded by a political arena needing leadership as they inter-relate with one another. Consequently, the question of sovereignty is always very sensitive in the discussion of politics. But it is often confused by liberalists with selfishness and identified with exploitation. More often than not, the essence of sovereignty is questioned and efforts are most of the time geared toward minimizing its power in the society. In effect, Thomas Hobbes understands sovereignty and invites all to reflect on it. He wants us to think straight of the absolute sovereign as the restorer and preserver of peace. The concept of absolute sovereignty is the core of Hobbes’ political philosophy. Part 1 of Leviathan, which culminates in the discussion of the state of nature, is intended to establish the necessity of Hobbes’ theory of sovereignty, its nature and its justification. According to him, only a sovereign with absolute power can liberate individuals from the violence posed by the state of nature and to protect them from returning to it. As such, the alternative to this state of nature is, for Hobbes, the absolute sovereign whom he personifies as the “Leviathan.” He considers absolute sovereignty as the best political system in which peace, Hobbes’ overriding concern, could be best preserved. The peace Hobbes seeks is for the good of the people who are the objective of government action. Before continuing to prescribe the methodological framework of this dissertation, it will be important to clearly state its main objective. Our objective is to investigate whether there will be an ardent respect of God and for human dignity in a political system that practices absolute sovereignty as Hobbes portrays. This leads us to ask salient questions that the work seeks to answer following Hobbes’ political insight. To this end, the overriding question of focus is: what is the place of God and human dignity in a commonwealth that practices absolute sovereignty? Related to this are other minor questions that will be answered in the course of this work. They include: what is absolute sovereignty according to Hobbes and how should it run the state? What are the foundations that make sovereignty necessarily absolute? What type of state existed before an absolute sovereign state? And what relevance has Hobbes’ theory of absolute sovereignty to our present day society? Keywords: Sovereignty, Power, Common Good, Good Governance, Human Right and Freedom.

Jurisprudence, 2010

INTRODUCTION Hobbes's definition and use of the term 'liberty' has been and continues to be the subject of much debate within Hobbes scholarship. The change in definition from De Cive 1 to Leviathan 2 is one such focus of commentary; 3 another is his purported change in definition between applications of 'liberty' to the state of nature and to civil society. 4 Other commentators also discuss his use in Leviathan of more than one meaning for the term. 5 The focus of a recent study is Hobbes's purported rejection of the rich 'republican' traditional understanding of liberty, in order to champion a radically restricted application of the term to mean nothing more than the absence of external impediments to one's actions. 6 In this article I examine (2010) 1 Jurisprudence 85-104 85

2008

Hobbes and Republican Liberty he offers a dazzling comparison of two rival theories about the nature of human liberty. The first originated in classical antiquity, and lay at the heart of the Roman republican tradition of public life. It flowered in the city-republics of Renaissance Italy, and has been central to much recent discussion of republicanism among contemporary political theorists. Thomas Hobbes was the most formidable enemy of this pattern of thought, and his attempt to discredit it constitutes a truly epochal moment in the history of Anglophone political thought. Professor Skinner shows how Hobbes's successive efforts to grapple with the question of human liberty were deeply affected by the claims put forward by the radical and parliamentarian writers in the course of the English civil wars, and by Hobbes's sense of the urgent need to counter them in the name of peace. Skinner approaches Hobbes's political theory not simply as a general system of ideas but as a polemical intervention in the conflicts of his time, and he shows that Leviathan, the greatest work of political philosophy ever written in English, reflects a substantial change in the character of Hobbes's moral thought, responding very specifically to the political needs of the moment. As Professor Skinner says, seething polemics always underlie the deceptively smooth surface of Hobbes's argument. Hobbes and Republican Liberty is an extended essay that develops several of the themes announced by Quentin Skinner in his famous inaugural lecture on Liberty before Liberalism of 1998. Cogent, engaged, accessible and indeed exhilarating, this new book will appeal to readers of history, politics and philosophy at all levels, and provides an excellent introduction to the work of one of the most celebrated thinkers of our time.

Hobbes Studies, 2019

Hobbes, in his political writing, is generally understood to be arguing for absolutism. I argue that despite apparently supporting absolutism, Hobbes, in Leviathan, also undermines that absolutism in at least two and possibly three ways. First, he makes sovereignty conditional upon the sovereign’s ability to ensure the safety of the people. Second and crucially, he argues that subjects have inalienable rights, rights that are held even against the sovereign. When the subjects’ preservation is threatened they are no longer obliged to obey the sovereign. Third, there is also a possible limitation on the absolute power of the sovereign in the form of restrictions Hobbes puts in place on what laws he may legitimately make. Finally, Hobbesian absolutism is compared to the absolutism of Carl Schmitt. This exercise demonstrates the limitations that Hobbes places on the power and authority of the sovereign.

History of Political Thought, 2019

This article reconsiders Thomas Hobbes's critique of the democratic sovereign form from the standpoint of what it identifies as the latter's most important ontological conditions: the lack of a transcendent source of fundamental law, and a natural human equality that renders all individuals competent to participate in legislative modes. For Hobbes these two conditions combine to render democracy a tragic regime. Democracy is tragic to the extent that it must be a regime of self-limitation, there existing no ethical standard external to society that may intervene so as to guide our political self-activity, and yet the structure of deliberation in democratic assemblies tends to render such self-limitation impossible. Hence what Hobbes sees as the inherent tendency of democratic activity to descend into excess and madness. This risk is an intrinsic potentiality embedded within democracy's very conditions, a fact covered up by much post-Hobbesian liberal democratic theory that attempts to normatively ground the democratic form in various universal principles of natural law or right.