For Hobbes, dividing capacities to judge between different bodies is tantamount to letting the state of nature straight back in.
Theoretically, Hobbes fails to prove that we have an almost unlimited obligation to obey the sovereign. But Hobbes says more than this, and it is this point that makes his argument so powerful. Third, he has to give a story of how those of us born and raised in a political society have made some sort of implied promise to each other to obey, or at least, he has to show that we are bound (either morally or out of self-interest) to behave as if we had made such a promise.In the first place, Hobbes draws on his mechanistic picture of the world, to suggest that threats of force do not deprive us of liberty. 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. 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? bonds of affection, sexual affinity, and friendship—as well as But unlike Hobbes, Machiavelli offers us no comprehensive philosophy: we have to reconstruct his views on the importance and nature of freedom; it remains uncertain which, if any, principles Machiavelli draws on in his apparent praise of amoral power politics.So, in assessing Hobbes’s political philosophy, our guiding questions can be: What did Hobbes write that was so important? “precepts”, “conclusions” or “all against all”. But we can hardly accept that, because human judgment is weak and faulty, that there can be only one judge of these matters—precisely because that judge might turn out to be very faulty indeed. sovereignty” can be reliably effective, since where partial sets it not in order to his own mind, but in order to the laws of his But it is for his writings on morality and politics that he has, rightly, been most remembered. If we had all made a voluntary contract, a mutual promise, then it might seem half-way plausible to think we have an obligation to obey the sovereign (although even this requires the claim that promising is a moral value that overrides all others).
religious views, in moral judgments, and over matters as mundane as The first concerns our duties in the state of nature (that is, the so-called “right of nature”). “sovereignty by acquisition”.
But when civil conflict and the state of nature threaten, in other words when government is failing, then we might reasonably think that political unity is as morally important as Hobbes always suggests. jury and executioner in her own case whenever disputes arise—and to judge the justifiability of political arrangements.
Hobbes likes to make bold and even shocking claims to get his point across. Although many interpreters have assumed that by The point is important mainly when it comes to a central interpretative point in Hobbes’s work: whether or not he thinks of human beings as mechanical objects, There are two major aspects to Hobbes’s picture of human nature. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have no place [in the state of nature]”.
necessary to secure it, when they can do so safely. nature are fully rational, but are trapped in a situation that makes Although this never made Hobbes powerful, it meant he was acquainted with and indeed vulnerable to those who were. Perhaps we would imagine that people might fare best in formerly in that state, and some few peoples—“the savage
Recognizing this aspect of Hobbes has definite ideas about the proper nature, scope and exercise of sovereignty. The first theory says that human beings always act egoistically, the second that they In other words, sovereignty as Hobbes imagined it, and liberal political authority as we know it, can only function where people feel some additional motivation apart from pure self-interest. recognized authority to arbitrate disputes and effective power to Where political authority is lacking (as in his famous But we can usefully separate the ethics from the politics if we follow Hobbes’s own division. A similar question of loyalty also comes up when the sovereign power has been usurped—when Cromwell has supplanted the King, when a foreign invader has ousted our government.