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Hobbes on monarchy

June 14, 2011 in Hobbes, Representation, Sovereignty | No comments

Louis XIV of France

In the second edition of De Cive (1647) doubts were casted on monarchy being the sole most appropriate political regime. After Cromwell’s boost, Hobbes’s dictum regarding the most suitable government seemed to shift towards a monarchic ideal since Leviathan.(1) Envy appeared as the greatest obstacle for most people in recognizing monarchy’s blessing and superiority. A sign of this superiority could be observed in the fact that power to wage war belonged only to the sovereign as well as all kinds of military actions.(2) Against those who kept belief in a traditional mixed monarchy, counterweighted by several other instances. he insisted in its spurious character.(3)

Following Hobbes’s theory of language, there was no reason for the classical distinction between corrupted and good governments; they just exemplify the particular opinion of individuals and their adherents.(4) The difference among possible regimes came down to whether the representative was a single person or a plurality, and Hobbes stressed how the condemnation of a monarchy for being a tyranny was a question of personal pleasure or displeasure rather than an objective statement.(5) The suitability of a government had to be judged according to its capacity in maintaining the highest good of the political system, its ability attaining and conserving peace, according to the first law of nature for private and public interests coincide in this political system.(6)

The possibility of there being a tyrant, in the use of that predicate, was banished since the annihilatio mundi had dissolved any stable link to reality. Hobbes’s construction deactivated such a line of judgment on the plain of consistence by means of a rearrangement of elements in the plane of construction. Sovereignty was not only legitimized, but the logical possibilities of being dismantled in political discourse were also precluded. He who denominated tyrant to a king was simply making a personal judgment with no relation to any actual state of the world. The king shall not be dethroned for no member of the commonwealth could assert what good and bad was, especially against the institution that established moral conduct.

Traditional forms of legitimation were being debunked or kept precariously by the struggles occurring during Hobbes’s productive period, -a modern rational legitimation was needed. The King had been the Head of the state, a process of abstraction involved the modern concept of sovereignty within a net of conceptions related to the legal order, rather than the mortal and frail figure of the king-person developed since the fifteenth century. The cover representation of Leviathan became the depiction of a foundation in which the king became, consistently with the post-Copernican noetic space, equated to the sun. All the individuals composing him conformed a procession directed towards the head of the sovereign, replacing, transferring, the ‘caput Christi’.(7)

We will have to wait more than a century to reproduce the situation lived by Hobbes on the Continent, after the king and sovereignty as, the principal attribute of the state, were rejoined. “They did not challenge the sovereignty in plain terms, and by that name, till they had slain the King…”(8) When the subject is king, the king becomes subject, -the individual is invested with sovereignty and the sovereign turned into an individual.

(1) In the preface of De Cive he admits, “…Monarchy is the most commodious government (which one thing alone I confesse in this whole book not to be demonstrated, but only probably stated) yet every where I expresly say, that in all king of Government whatsoever, there ought to be a supreme and equall power.” Nevertheless he later endeavours in demonstrating why monarchy is to be prefered, “Now that Monarchy of the foresaid forms, of Democracy, Aristocraty, and Monarchy, hath the preheminence, will best appear by comparing the conveniences and inconveniences arising in each of them,” Ibid. X, 3 also see Hobbes’ conclusion in ibid. X, 19.
(2) “But it is a manifest sign, that the most absolute Monarchy is the best state of government….” De Cive X, 17.
(3) “Only that fault, which was generally in the whole nation, which was, that they thought the government of England was not an absolute, but a mixed monarchy,” Behemoth III (M. VI, p. 306). After conceiving the instituton of the sovereign by covenant, Hobbes is able to attribute all authority to him. According to Bobbio his main target was the unity of the sovereign that assured the stability lost in England, he preferred unity to autonomy. Carl Schmitt sees the reunification of authority from the diverse instances as Hobbes’s principal concern, the concentration of the might disbanded in the feudal organization. “Für Hobbes kommt es darauf an, durch den Staat die Anarchie des feudalen, ständischen oder kirchlichen Widerstandrechts und den daraus fortwährend neu entbrennenden Bürgerkrieg zu überwinden un dem mittelalterlichen Pluralismus, den Herrschaftsansprüchen der Kirchen und anderer „indirekter“ Gewalten die rational Einheit einer eindeutigen, eines wirksamen Schutzes fähigen Macht und eines berechenbar funktionierenden Legalitätssystems entgegenzusetzen,“ C. Schmitt, op. cit., p. 113.
(4) “…so as we see these names betoken not as diverse kinde of Government, but the diverse opinions of the Subjects concerning him who hath the Supreme Power.” De Cive VII, 2.
(5) Leviathan II, 19, 2.
(6) “From whence it follows, that where the public and the private interest are most closely united, there is the public most advanced. Now in monarchy, the private interest is the same with the public. The riches, power, and honour of a monarch arise only from the riches, strength and reputation of his subjects,” Leviathan II, 19, 4.
(7) H. Brederkamp, Thomas Hobbes visuelle Strategien. Der Leviathan. Das Urbild des modernen Staates. Werkillustrationen und Portraits, Berlin, 1999.
(8) Behemoth, I, (M. VI, p. 197)

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Hobbes on the religious jurisdiction

May 27, 2011 in Hobbes, Religion, Sovereignty | No comments

Baciccio 003

St. Peter’s successors had established a kingdom of darkness and fantasy,
a kingdom of fairies.(1) The clergy was dependent onto the civil sovereign, like judges and magistrates. Pastors had to act according to the iure civile meanwhile the sovereign, God’s fiat, was the sole one who operated by iure divino. An annexation of the religious to the civil, to the mortal god, took place. The clergy was relegated to civil servants, obeying the dictates of their spiritual and political leader, “…the civil sovereign in every commonwealth, is the head, the source, the root, and the sun, from which all jurisdiction is derived. And therefore the jurisdiction of bishops is derived from the civil sovereign.”(2)

In order to attain this reduction of the potestas papae Hobbes had to confront the reasons put forward by its most able exponent, Cardinal Bellarmine. The union of the spiritual and the civil was granted by their coincidence in the same person.(3) All the historical quarrels between Papacy and the different kings, seeds of most wars and seditions, could be overcome if the supreme pastor was also embodied in the civil sovereign.

This was also made feasible by the simplification, the reduction, of faith epitomized in two tenets, the admission of Jesus as the Christ and the acknowledgement of obligation. Hobbes resumes his task transferring solely to the sovereign the prescription of rules: “For though God be the sovereign of all the world, we are not bound to take for his law, whatsoever is propounded by every man in his name; nor anything contrary to the civil law, which God hath expressly commanded us to obey.”4 This occurred when all reasons being equal, there was no privileged access in spiritual questions and they ought to be resolved by an authority invested with the power.

(1) Leviathan IV, 4, 21 seq.
(2) Leviathan III, 42, 116. His relation to Erastus can be observed in comparing the ideas of this author. In his Seventy-five Theses he alleged that “if that Church and State were most wisely founded, arranged, and appointed, any other must merit approbation which approaches to its form as nearly as present times and circumstances will permit. So that wherever the magistrate is godly, there is no need of any other authority under any other pretension or title to rule or punish the people…”
(3) “…he which heareth his sovereign being a Christian, heareth Christ…” Leviathan III, 42, 106.
(4) Leviathan III, 42, 46.

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Hobbes and the Papacy question

May 24, 2011 in Power, Religion, Sovereignty | No comments

Matthias of Trakai

The aimed unity of sovereignty supposed no interference of external elements in the administration of the commonwealth. A decisive historical issue in this regard had been the question concerning the relation between Papacy and King. In this regard the plane of construction used elements already present in Marsilius of Padua, distinguishing both state and Church, not only to maintain their difference, but to utter the submission of the ecclesiastical authority to the civil. For Marsilius, the Church was guilty of disturbing the peace of civil regimes, spreading unrest and malaise. The present stress on the terrestrial character of life and immanence, -the attachment to earthly matters as sufficient condition to the stabilization of the social system-, buttressed the intentions of the Defensor Pacis.(1)

How did Hobbes’s moral subject, under the law of the Gospel and the civil law, surmounted the logical impossibility of obeying two different and possibly contradictory masters? Self-conscience was not a possible way out, since the Protestant Reformation every man could sustain different ideas concerning the content of the natural law. The solution was again based on immanence: the monarch´s dictates had to be adhered.(2) As long as the sovereign himself was a Christian there shall not be any discrepancy between the conscience of the Christian and divine law. Furthermore, laws only compelled action but not the subject’s conscience.(3) The king was God’s vicar on earth and therefore no controversy between his mandate and the Christian doctrine could stand. King was sovereign by covenant, like God established his sovereignty on the Jews.

(1) “It is precisely this opposition and distinction between ‘lay’ and ‘ecclesiastical’ which Marsilus refuses to accept and it was the very distinction of spiritual and temporal jurisdictions which Marsilus saw as the fundamental evil of his times. He will try to show that there is no such thing as spiritual jurisdiction because the very meaning of jurisdiction is the capacity to establish laws which coerce the non-compliant, and this capacity may only be legitimately actualized by the corporate will of the citizen body of any city or ‘state’. Therefore his solution, as we shall see, is to reverse the papal hierocratic theory of absolute jurisdiction and incorporate the church into the state,” J. Coleman, A History of Political Thought. From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, Oxford, 2000, p. 136.
(2) “…in all things not contrary to the moral law, (that is to say, the law of nature,) all subjects are bound to obey that for divine law, which is declared to be so, by the laws of the commonwealth.” Leviathan II, 26, 40.
(3) “These things considered it will easily appear: that under the sovereign power of a Christian commonwealth, there is no danger of damnation from simple obedience to human laws; for in that the sovereign alloweth Christianity, no man is compelled to renounce that faith which is enough for his salvation; that is to say, the fundamental points,” Elements of Law II, 25, 11.

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Hobbes on the sovereign’s obligations

May 22, 2011 in Society, Sovereignty | No comments

Prince Yine

Besides the preservation of life, the sovereign acquired other roles in Hobbes’s conception. Not only “…the safety of the people…”,(1) but also their good, -salus populi suprema lex-,(2) the government had to benefit the people. Hobbes even recommended the formation of a social system of charity.(3) Indeed, an important reason to prefer monarchy to other political regimes was the fact that the king, wanting the best for himself, as it was entailed by his individual constitution, achieved this goal by enhancing the best for his subjects. The greater welfare subjects achieved, the more prosperous the monarch would be. Another ground to opt for monarchy as an institution was the natural unity and simplicity of the king that enabled the constant exercise of power.(4) No reunion or assembly of the bearers of sovereignty was necessary. Both democracy and aristocracy presented a caesura in the operation of power, equated by Hobbes to the sleep of the monarch, producing a rapture of command.

Another intrinsic aim of the sovereign had to be the spreading among his subjects of the obedience to the political system and the will to keep it.(5) Education had to focus on the respect for the civil laws and propose the grounds for sociability. In this sense, the citizens had to be instructed in the social virtues that bring forth a commonwealth; education was assigned with maintaining and indoctrinating the status quo.(6)

(1) Leviathan II, 30, 1.
(2)De Cive XIII, 2. Hobbes states the duty of the sovereign not only to provide his citizens with all the necessary goods, but also with the attainment of a pleasurable life, cf. Ibid. XIII, 4. It is interesting to analyse the shift of the word salus. With the use of the vernaculars and the progressive decay of Latin not only the integration according to nations was possible, but also certain semantic shifts that would alter the form in which people perceived and understood the world. The adoption of the vernaculars in the translation of the Bible, the first milestone in that direction, afforded a change in words that had previously an important religious weight and that started being extended to other fields of meaning, displacing the Christian heap and replacing it by a naturalistic interpretation of words like salus (from salvation to welfare or health). It was harder to scape from the semantic weight of a language naturally associated to the Church like Latin (services where always in that language, and similarly to Islam, where Arab is intrinsically associated to the Quoran, it was the elected tongue to spread the Gospel). The vernaculars diverted from the given meanings and made possible the transformation into a different social configuration.
(3) “And whereas many men, by accident inevitable, become unable to maintain themselves by their labour; they ought not to be left to the charity of private persons; but to be provided for, (as far forth as the necessities of nature require,) by the laws of commonwealth,” Leviathan II, 30, 18. On the other hand, “…for such as have strong bodies, the case is otherwise: they are to be forced to work; and to avoid the excuse of not finding employment, there ought to be such laws, as may encourage all manner of arts…” Ibid. 30, 19.
(4) “It is not therefore the word of the law, but the power of man that has the strength of a nation, that make the laws effectual.” A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England, (M. VI, p. 10).
(5) “For the prosperity of a people ruled by an aristocratical, or democratical assembly, cometh not from aristocracy, nor from democracy, but from the obedience, and concord of the subjects…” Leviathan II, 30, 7.
(6) Leviathan II, 30, 7-13.

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Hobbes on representation and sovereignty

April 30, 2011 in Hobbes, Representation, Sovereignty | No comments

Neer, Eglon van der - Die Frau des Kandaules entdeckt den versteckten Gyges - 1675–80

Under a sovereign, according to the conception of actor and author, -a representational theory-, the king was the actor, but the people remained the authors.(1) Thus sovereignty was based on representation, on the institution, not on covenant, not on the obligation or constitution.(2) By the theory of obligation all individuals became subjects, the constitution is a mere hypothesis; the actual bond does maintain the allegiance necessary for the commonwealth to subsist by means of the covenant.

The definition of sovereign referred thus to the one instituted by the individuals in order to protect themselves, not to the constitutive body for it lacks any life-like feature. Sovereignty was an instrument of reason devised in order to maintain life, departing from the individual and returning to him, rendering him member of the commonwealth, -citizen. Power could be either directed towards the body, being therefore physical, involuntary, but it could also be exerted on the will, altering the grounds on which deliberation takes place. This was the aspect on which political power acted, forming voluntary deliberation.

(1) “…every subject is author of the actions of his sovereign…” Leviathan II, 18, 7.
(2) S. Goyard-Fabre, “La notion de souveraineté de Bodin à Hobbes,” Y.-Ch. Zarka (ed.), op. cit., p. 220.

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Hobbes on the attributes of sovereignty

April 28, 2011 in Hobbes, Religion, Sovereignty | No comments

Gestrandeter Wal bei Lemwerder - 1670

According to Mark’s Gospel “a kingdom divided in itself cannot stand…”(1) it had to remain forming a unity. The first right accorded to individuals was the protection of their bodies and members from the likely attack of others, both internally and externally. The rapine of other states required the defense of the territory and the commonwealth. The axiom that gave unity and capacity of action to the state, the anima, was its sovereignty, proclaiming its individuality, its autonomy in front of other actors in politics. Already in the introduction of Leviathan sovereignty was compared to the inflating principle of the body, to an artificial spirit that brought forth the state live, implying its living principle. The only state, the only legitimate rule was sovereign.

The supreme authority is also depicted as unlimited, absolute.(2) To be superior to all is to be supreme, to be sovereign is to dominate on all others, to be absolute,(3) and this dominium is supreme and indivisible power.(4) The clearest example of that superiority of the sovereign, of his vertical institution,(5) is his impunity. The sovereign, not being subject to any other instance, did not have to obey the laws he enacted.(6) Absolute sovereignty is defined by a community where men are “…deprived of their right to protect themselves.”(7) Only the sovereign retained the gladium iustitiae, the right to coerce and punish. And this absolute sovereignty is warranted by the fact that the monarch could not be resisted or the sovereign council dissolved for that would mean there was a higher authority. A law, a common rule, is only such if it has been ordained by the sovereign. Hobbes recycled the Christian metaphor of soul but dislocated it, applying it to a different domain, the shaping of the sovereign, and relating it to the central metaphor of life. These traditional elements are rearranged in relation to another context after being removed from its original emplacement; words remain, relations of order and meaning change. Reconfiguring God’s attributes, they were translated in the modeling of a mortal God. Political theology was denied but the existing images and facets were used to convey the required feature of grandiosity. Canvassing the idea of sovereignty, Hobbes ended up proclaiming the birth of a supernatural being, a mortal god, the human attainment of heaven grounded on earth, the highest finite construction:

The greatest of human powers, is that which is compounded of the powers of most men, united by consent, in one person, natural, or civil, that has the use of all their powers depending on his will; such as is the power of a faction or of divers factions leagued. Therefore to have servants, is power; to have friends, is power; for they are strengths united.(8)

(1) This is Hobbes’ dictum, “the greatest inconvenience that can happen to a commonwealth, is the aptitude to dissolve into civil war, and to this are monarchies much less subject, than any other governments.” Elements of Law II, 24, 8.
(2) “L’originalité des définitions données par Hobbes consiste ainsi à suggérer que le souverain est une sorte de tenancier perpétuel, indispensable pour la survie du propriétaire!” L. Jaume, “Le vocabulaire de la représentation politique de Hobbes a Kant”, Y.-Ch. Zarka (ed.), op. cit., p 237.
(3) Leviathan, II, 18, 16.
(4) “…that king whose power is limited, is not superior to him, or them that have the power to limit it; and he that is not superior, is not supreme…” Leviathan II, 19, 12.
(5) De Cive VIII, 1.
(6) “…all governments which men are bound to obey, are simple, and absolute.” Leviathan III, 42, 82.
(7) “…but the will of a Councell, or one who hath the Supreme Authority given him, is the will of the City; he therefore containes the wills of all particualr Citizens; Therefore neither is he bound to the Civil Lawes (for this is to be bound to himelf) nor to any of his Citizens.” De Cive VI, 14.
(8) Elements of Law II, 27, 6.“It is an error therefore to think: that the power which is virtually the whole power of the commonwealth, and which in whomsoever it resideth, is usually called supreme or sovereign, can be subject to any law but that of God Almighty.”

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Hobbes on Bodin’s concept of sovereignty

April 26, 2011 in Hobbes, Methodology, Representation, Sovereignty | No comments

Jean Bodin

In Jean Bodin’s Six Livres de la République (1576) the foundations of the principle of sovereignty had been already established, propounding a justification for the French monarch. Hobbes abode Bodin’s characteristics of sovereignty, yet he did not adopt the underlying context on which Bodin developed them. Bodin still bounded the supreme power of the sovereign to divine and natural law. Laws had to contain a certain value, had to bare natural justice. In Hobbes natural law only acted igniting the sparkle of an order that, after being instituted, became independent. In Bodin, the fragmentation of power was maintained by insisting in the divine character of power, there was no actual human institution but a heavenly prerogative.

Bodin’s method also differed substantially from Hobbes’s deductivism. He sustained a humanist historical-comparative approach, accepting a naturalist stance of authority by which the source of power was an imitatio divina, evincing its godlike character. To Hobbes rather than a resemblance with God’s lordship because of the same model of submission, the analogy resided in the institution of a covenant, of a conventional agreement. Hobbes rejected both traditional political theology(1) and naturalism. The constitution of the commonwealth followed, according to Bodin, the aggregation of families, social unities, to the agrandissement and constitution of a state. In the same vein as Aristotle, the state was but the enlargement, a reproduction, of the family system, it appeared thus as natural. Within Hobbes’s system sovereignty was instituted, the state only surged after the convention among people wishing to escape the natural state, -it was artificial. Moreover, in the very state of nature, -a mental construct-, the actors are men, solitary wanderers;(2) nevertheless, Hobbes still retained most of the basic properties of majestas set by Bodin.(3)

Sovereignty was deemed to be perpetual; it ought to be eternal, but their constituents, men and assemblies of men are mortal. This essential fragility supposed the relapse into the state of nature unless a system of succession was proposed. The one provided by monarchy, based on the decision of a single man, was the more feasible and apt to prevent the dissolution of majestas. For when the spirit decays, the body tumbles extenuated.(4) The main cause of mortality was the disintegration motivated by individual passions and dissidence. The preference for absolute sovereignty to aristocracy precluded the danger of factions entangled in an argument reverting in civil war.(5) Thus the sovereign afforded and represented the endless disposition of the commonwealth and was necessary for the subsistence of the represented, both being interlocked.(6)

(1) L. Borot, “Le vocabulaire du contrat, du pacte et de l’alliance: quelques enjeux lexicaux”, Y.-Ch. Zarka (ed.), op. cit., p. 205.
(2) “…indem er die Monarchie zur blossen Erscheinungsform eines staatlichen Legalitätssystems machte, vernichtete er alle ihre traditionellen und legitimen Fundamente göttlichen Rechts. Er konnte seinen monarchistischen Glauben nur dadurch retten, daß er in einen grundsätzlichen Agnostizismus zurückzog.” C. Schmitt, op. cit., p. 126.
(3) J. Bodin, Les Six Livres de la République, VIII. It has also been argued some direct precedents of a theory of sovereignty in other state theoreticians. According to A. Black, Monarchy and Community. Political Ideas in the Later Conciliar Controversy 1430-1450, Cambridge, 1970, “Turrecremata thus to some extent anticipated what has been regarded as the specific achievement of Bodin, namely the elaboration of an abstract notion of sovereignty as necessary for all societies and as the only legitimate source of power,” p. 84.
(4) “The sovereignty is the soul of the commonwealth; which once departed from the body, the members do no more receive their motion from it.” Leviathan II, 21, 21.
(5) This is Hobbes’ dictum, “the greatest inconvenience that can happen to a commonwealth, is the aptitude to dissolve into civil war, and to this are monarchies much less subject, than any other governments.” Elements of Law II, 24, 8.
(6) “L’originalité des définitions données par Hobbes consiste ainsi à suggérer que le souverain est une sorte de tenancier perpétuel, indispensable pour la survie du propriétaire!” L. Jaume, “Le vocabulaire de la représentation politique de Hobbes a Kant”, Y.-Ch. Zarka (ed.), op. cit., p 237.

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Hobbes on the stability of peace and the necessity of a king

April 24, 2011 in Hobbes, Power, Sovereignty | No comments

'Gaius Mucius Scaevola Confronting King Porsenna', oil on copper painting by Bernardo Cavallino

Meanwhile peace was being settled on the continent, England was suffering the precariousness of a king dethroned and executed. The causes of this anarchy were to be found, according to Hobbes, in the manifold of religious doctrines and opinions baiting dissent and endangering the political stasis stemming from the feudal constitution granted by the Carta Magna (1215). The division of sovereign power with the Parliament, following the mixed-government theory, and the impossibility of its dissolution without its own consent since 1641 precipitated the removal of the constitutional principles established and showed the necessity of a justification for a a novel balance of power. Hobbes wagered for a compact authority without any impediments, free, extending his idea of human liberty, -minimal and absolute-.(1) Despite his proclaimed monarchism, the theory of political obligation also helped backing up Cromwell’s revolutionary order. It promoted all kinds of institution consistent with the plane of construction deployed. Hobbes’s return to England in 1651, after finishing Leviathan, appears to some as a gesture moving away from the Royalist cause. His Erastianism, his dismal view on the effects of religious dissent, could have superseded his Royalist agenda, just a particular, discrete, form of institution.(2)

The first maneuver to relieve his country’s agony was to discredit the opinions that enfeebled the position of the king and his command. Suarez and his doctrine concerning the righteousness of tyrannicide, of a monarch’s deposition based on a moral judgment, was still common. But who was able to draw an inference about the bounty of the instituted sovereign? Following a basic emotivism and the incapacity to ascertain any content of truth in moral judgments, a ‘tyrant’ was only an estimation that did not contain any objectivity, it was a mere personal, individual, evaluation that could endanger the first law of nature: peace.

(1) In this double character can be traced back both traditions that interpret Hobbes as a defender of a liberal state and the total state.
(2) “…Hobbes’s religious thought eventually became the determinant of his allegiance, that his Erastian ecclesiology finally tramped other considerations and drew him away from the Stuart cause.” J.R. Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, New York, 2005, p. 8.

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Hobbes and Westphalia

April 15, 2011 in Hobbes, Society, Sovereignty, War | No comments

Study for Spínola in La rendición de Breda, by Diego Velázquez

“And to prevent for the future any Differences arising in the Politick State, all and every one of the Electors, Princes and States of the Roman Empire, are so establish’d and confirm’d in their antient Rights, Prerogatives, Libertys, Privileges, free exercise of Territorial Right, as well Ecclesiastick, as Politick Lordships, Regales, by virtue of this present Transaction: that they never can or ought to be molested therein by any whomsoever upon any manner of pretence.”

Treaty of Westphalia, article LXIV (1648)

Hobbes was concerned with the instability reigning in his country; distress made him rearrange the order of his initial project. He did not only start publishing the supposedly third part of his Elementa, De Cive, in first place. He also dwelt in harkening the dissemination of his political ideas in the form of his myth-building Leviathan. This work enlarged and amended his previous propositions attempting to render an accessible plain of consistence. The motivation to write Leviathan, according to Hobbes’s explanation to it to Edward Hyde, was to be able to return to England after his necessary exile.(1)

De Cive was published during his exile in Paris to prevent his possible persecution as a supporter of the monarchy. It remained his most articulated political work, -his geometrical treatise of political philosophy. He pointed in his latter De Corpore how it was meant to be the first proper treatise on political science. The date of publication was 1642, at the time Europe was still involved in the Thirty Years War. The new emerging order confirmed the territorial rights of the European sovereigns by backing the Peace of Augsburg (1555) on religious toleration.

(1) F. Tönnies, Thomas Hobbes. Leben und Lehre, Stuttgart, 1971 (orig. 1925), p. 42.

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Hobbes on the effects of the covenant: institution and constitution

April 13, 2011 in Hobbes, Society, Sovereignty | No comments

Study 1 for La rendición de Breda, by Diego Velázquez

People became only an organized person in the very moment of the common transference of their rights, but in that same moment they become subjects to the sovereign. The organization of the people is a legal fiction that does not entail a unitarian entity, this only happens in the very act of institution of the sovereign, and as soon this attribution of personality decays there is no personal obligation to the people,(1) for their constitution serves only as an imaginary stage in the process of institution founded on mas described as an individual.

A covenant is the only possibility to suture totally disunited parts that gather for their own benefit. Hobbes’s civil society had renounced to find any traditional bound between people and opted for a union of interest. Still there were external enemies, that is, people more detestable than the competing neighbour, for they do not share any common agreement with us. The covenant is an artifice that supplants natural allegiance, tracing the frontiers between the inside and the outside of the group. There is a clear-cut division of the community, a definition of the boundaries, of those who belong and those who are out. Those who are not subject to the laws of the commonwealth are enemies, “…denying subjection, he denies such punishment as by the law hath been ordained; and therefore suffers as an enemy of the commonwealth.”(2)

An absolute liberty is transformed, after the covenant, in an agreement composed of rights and laws, liberties and obligations. Only the power of the commonwealth remained absolute and the individuals relative. The limit to the covenant between man and sovereign was the right every man possessed to defend himself and repel all possible aggressions;(3) logical outcome of a plane of construction governed by life and its preservation as an axiom. This had been the utmost reason for the perfectioning of the contract. The personal security of every subject had to be afforded by the supreme authority by establishing and executing punishments. The existence of authority is required for the enforcement of the covenant, for “…covenants, without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to secure man at all.”(4) Nevertheless, no one can be obliged to renounce to this inalienable right to preservation not even in front of the sovereign; its institution was an instrument to the safeguard of its members. Disobedience filters in this compact vision of subjection the possibility of its denial in case that a punishment endangers the subject’s integrity. Obedience and loyalty have limits, the checks imposed by physical integrity, consistent with the central axiom, -life and body. This is the only possible pitfall for a sovereign, -an institution-, that is otherwise designed to be absolute.

(1) De Cive, VII, 12.
(2) Leviathan, II, 28, 13.
(3) Leviathan, I, 14, 25.
(4) Leviathan, II, 1, 2.

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