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Hobbesian Concepts

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23 views19 pages

Hobbesian Concepts

Uploaded by

sude.sevval.karasu
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Hobbesian Concepts

Political Theory 1
Sezgi Durgun
Intellectual Outlook in Europe
Hobbes (1588-1679)
Centralized Government: Single Sovereignty
Civil War: England (1642-1644) and France
Drastic changes in Political Theory
Keywords
• Absolutism: unconditional and unified
sovereign authority; no collective right of
resistance.
• Egoism: individuals motivated by self·interest.
• Political obligation: individuals relinquish
natural rights with the exception of the right
of self·preservation
• The social contract: a contract between
subjects establishing absolute government.
• Sovereignty: absolute, with a preference for
monarchy
• The state of nature: war of all, against all
• “Bellum omnium contra omnes”
• Life as 'solitary, poore, nasty, brutish,and

short'.
Hobbes was not only a scientist in his own right but
a great systematizer of the scientific findings of his
contemporaries, including Galileo and Johannes
Kepler.
-Justification of wide-ranging government powers
on the basis of the self-interested consent of
citizens
Problem: Origin of Civil Society?
• How can self-interested individuals be brought
to cooperate when they would be better off
free-riding on the contributions of others?'
• Creating civil society therefore requires
merely the coordination of individuals'
interests rather than a fully fledged social
contract.
Materialistic view of Society
Hobbes defended materialism, the view that only
material things are real.
His scientific writings present all observed
phenomena as the effects of matter in motion.
Leviathan
Hobbes' Leviathan is divided into four parts:
1) of man, 2) of commonwealth, 3) of a Christian
commonwealth, and 4) of the Kingdom of Darkness.

His overall project is to explain by what reasons a


commonwealth may govern men, and then to
establish the best possible way for this
government to function in order to accommodate
the desires of its citizens.
Part One: Leviathan

The commonwealth is nothing but an


"artificial man."
Human exists in the external world as a
reactive creature that senses objects and is
driven to act by the constant motions of the
world
SC THEORY and HOBBES
• One of the classic problems of social contract theory is
explaining why a state of nature would be a state of
conflict.
• According to the early work of Hobbes Elements, there
are three reasons for war in the state of nature.
1)The first is structural rather than psychological: in the
absence of coercive authority, so long as some are
naturally aggressive, all must behave in an aggressive
manner in order to defend themselves.
2) Competition for the same goods.
3) Every man thinking well of himself, and hating to see
the same in others.
The state of nature

1. A perpetual state of war.

1. Here men are equal in that anyone can kill anyone else, and
as such men live in a constant state of fear and anxiety.
3. Since man's main goal in life is to protect his own life
through his rational capacities he reasons that the best way
to do this is to establish a state with a power great enough to
protect all who consent to live under it.
4. Thus, a state or commonwealth is established with the
sole purpose of protecting the lives of those who live within
it.
• Hobbes argues that social life is an 'iterated
game' , so that keeping promises always
serves our interest in self-preservation.
• He who breaks the Covenant cannot be
received into any Society and this is
consequently against the reason of his
preservation” (p.172)
Part Two: Leviathan

1. The citizen's obligations to this state, or 'Leviathan', and its


proper form and functions.
2. According to Hobbes, the best form of government is a
monarchy, since in any other form of government the
sovereign power is not strong enough to protect the subjects
from outside invaders and from themselves.
3. A subject's duty to the sovereign is total, and acting
otherwise is only hurting oneself, since the commonwealth is
established for the self-preservation of its subjects.
Option to leave?
1. One has the option of leaving the
commonwealth if one finds it too oppressive,
but to leave the commonwealth is to re-enter
the state of war that characterizes pre-social
man.
2. This is the worst possible outcome, since here
there is no right or wrong, no justice or
injustice, and man is constantly defending
himself.
The question of Morality
• In Leviathan, Hobbes developed an argument
for the compatibility of self-interest with the
duty of promise-keeping. However famous he
has become for defending egoism, Hobbes
seems never to have imagined that selfishness
is at odds with altruism and other moral
sentiments.
Contractarianism (p.173)
• “Civil society is a complex of authority and
power in which each element creates its own
appropriate obligation”
Hobbes presents three distinct lines of
argument
1)'Agency' or 'authorization' version of the social contract;
2)A'non-resistance' version;
3) 'Mutual Relation between Protection and Obedience'.

• To the first, subjects authorize the ruler's acts and it would


therefore be self-accusation to charge a ruler with misconduct.
• The second denies accountability on contractarian ground
• Proposition that living under the protection of a conqueror
constitutes a form of implicit consent.

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