Hobbes

Hobbes lived through the period of political disintegration that culminated in the English Civil War and the events that he witnessed traumatised him to the point that he formed the view that any government would be better than a civil war. He therefore attempted to establish rational principles for the construction of a society characterised by continued stability. Hobbes produced a “model” in which political obedience is a synonym of Peace. His theory is described in his great work “The Leviathan”; published in 1651, it has also been described as his “theory of rights”. In order to understand how Hobbes comes to accord rights to the sovereign we will first describe what he considers to be the state of Nature. The Hobbesian state of nature infers Laws of Nature and the establishment of a sovereign Authority. In the context of that “model”, the precise rights of the sovereign will be examined. We shall try to determine if and to which extent the subjects of this soverei...