INTRODUCTION TO

POLITICS

ORDERING THE POLITICAL

HOBBES AND SOVEREIGNTY
 The Social Contract

• In Hobbes’ version of the social contract each person

gives up (alienates) her rights of nature (absolute freedom
and equality) to another person or representative body.
• By virtue of this alienation of right this abstract body is
authorised (has authority) to enact law and enforce
contracts. In fact, “contracts without the sword are mere
words.”
• A sovereign authority is thus erected on the basis of
contract. For Hobbes even contracts extorted by force
bind.
 Hobbes National Gallery
• Hobbes 1588-1677
 WHAT IS AUTHORITY OR WHY OBEY
THE STATE
• Traditional forms of rule assumed religion or myth as a
legitimation device
• Machiavelli and Hobbes altered this understanding
regarding rule realistically and separable from moral
considerations.
• Hobbes made use of the device of a social contract and
emphasised the importance of emotions , in particular fear
and desire, as the cement of political association.
 The Resoluto-Compositive Method

• In The Leviathan (1651) Hobbes presented men and women

as desiring machines in a pre civil condition or what he
termed a state of nature.
• Without an agreed authority, life in this state is anarchic
and “the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”
• Significantly, it is also a condition of absolute freedom and
equality
• As any property cannot be enjoyed in this condition of
permanent war, reason and fear induce men to create a
better condition
 The Nature of the State
• The state provides order,
peace,security and a
known law. The basis of
civil obedience
• Laws are civil chains
binding all subjects equally
• Sovereignty is , absolute
and indivisible.
• Sovereignty is abstract-not
tied to one man /institution
• Ethically Hobbes is a
nominalist- right and
wrong area consequence
of law.
• Rule is based on abstract
calculation amongst
competitive individuals.
• The state is a convenient
superstructure to contain
human desire.
• 1651
 Alternative approaches
• John Locke adopted a similarly rational approach
to the problem of rule
• He also adapted the social contract approach
indicating that the state was a convenient
superstructure to manage human conduct
• Locke famous both for his inductivist psychology
and his tolerance regarding religious issues.
Famously he compared the mind to a blank wax
tablet on which sensory impressions as a
consequence of experience etched themselves.
 Locke’s two treatises
• Locke’s work addressed and refuted two
approaches to rule that arrived by different
routes at a doctrine of political absolutism
• The first treatise of civil government
addressed the issue of divine right
patriachalism and the work of Robt Filmer
who deduced the patriachal power of
Charles from that of the first father Noah
 Locke and state of nature theory
• The second treatise addressed the notion of state
of nature and a rational view of rule
• Locke disputed the Hobbesian understanding of
man in a state of nature
• For Locke condition of man in state of nature was
far more civilized
• He envisaged that although inconvenient the state
of nature would not be without civilization and
property ownership- ‘in the then vast wilderness
of the world all the world was America’
 John Locke
• Two Treatises
Locke’s limited view of government
• In the state of nature moreover all men would have access
to the ‘strange doctrine of the executive power of the state
of nature’
• This meant that all men could apply there reason to
address irrational acts that might occur in the natural state
• Also in the state of nature there would in certain more
civilized communities have existed a monetary economy
• Ultimately however the state proved unsatisfactory and
inconvenient
• To avoid the inconveniences and to create an impartial
umpire in matters of dispute men entered a contract to
create a common authority
 Limited and divided sovereignty
• Those who contract do so to protect and ensure their property
• Sovereignty is ultimately invested in the propertyholding people who elect a
legislature and an executive to carry out decisions that the people in their
legislative have arrived at
• The rational property holders thus create a limited government that acts
beyond its powers or arbitrarily if it interferes with the laws chosen by the
people or overrides an indefeasible right to property
• For Locke the executive is limited and sovereignty ideally divided between
executive,legislative and the ‘fiduciary’ or war making power
• Locke’s views had a huge impact on eighteenth century thought. Particularly
influenced were Montesqiue and American Democrats like Jefferson and
federalists like Madison and Hamilton.The doctrine of the division of powers
heavily influenced the declaration of independence .
• Locke’s work also impacted radicals like Thomas Paine who formulated more
fully the doctrine of the rights of man
 Rousseau and the General Will
• Rousseau influenced by contract theory and idea of state of
nature
• Arrived at v different conclusions about human nature and
appropriate forms of rule
• Man is born free but everywhere is in chains – opening
sentence of the Social Contract
• For Rousseau in state of nature man was naturally free.
Civilization had corrupted original human nature
• What was required was a new form of contract that
created new condition of moral or positive freedom
 The general will state
• Rousseau’s contract envisages each member of
the state contracting with each other and thereby
creating a sovereign people.
• Any decisions taken should reflect the general
will which required each member to consider only
the good of all
• Rousseau opposed any ‘partial’ associations like
clubs or the family interfering with the citizens
direct participation in the state.
 Direct Democracy
• Rousseau influenced by classic Greek ideal and also his
experience of Geneva where he was born
• Rousseau thought the general will state would require the
figure of a legislator to create the conditions for a morally
free condition of developmental democracy to appear.
• Rousseau had a significant impact on the revolutionary
Jacobins who ,under the Committee of Public Safety
chaired by maximilien Robespierre tried to implement a
moral political condition. Unfortunately it required the
guillotine and a reign of terror to implement it
 Paine and the Rights of Man
• Paine a contemporary of Rousseau and an active radical elected to
both the American and French Assemblies as a representative in 1776
and 1789
• Paine’s Rights of Man hugely influential on understandings of
representative democratic institutions
• Paine believed in the popular democratic capacity to elect wise and
virtuous representatives.Paine based democratic government on a
contract that preserved ‘self evident’ natural rights to ‘peace, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness’. Paine helped frame the French
Declaration of the Rights of Man ‘Men are born free and equal in
respect of their rights’ and the end of all political association ‘is the
preservation of the natural and imprescriptable rights of man. These
are Liberty, Property and Security..’
• Paine’s view of democratic rule entailed fair representation to
construct just laws
 Liberty
• Delacroix
 Edmund Burke and the rights of
Englishmen
• Burke an Irish Whig MP and the leading thinker
in the Rockingham Whig faction that dominated
the UK parliament viewed law and right very
differently.
• Burke an emblematic conservative because of his
pragmatism and scepticism particularly towards
the French Revolution
• In his refutation of Paine and radical democracy
in his Reflections on the Revolution in France
Burke advanced a doctrine of hereditary right and
prescription
 Burke and Right
• Burke moved away from the doctrine of natural right to
the convention of legal rights achieved within the
traditional constitutional evolution of the English
monarchy
• Burkean pragmatism emphasised the particular
constitutions of England and France and the legal rights
they developed. These were a lived constitutional
experiences rather than metaphysical and rationalist
abstractions
• The ‘pretended rights of theses theorists are all extremes:
and in proportion as they are metaphysically true they are
morally and politically false’.
Gilray and the English Cartoon
Burke’s Death mask
 Conclusion
• The notion of a state of nature operates as an interesting
device on which to premise understandings of:
• A) Natural Right
• B) the state as a construct and a convenient superstructure
• C) Views of allegiance/duty to the state grounded in some
version of rational consent
• D) An understanding of constitutional law placing
limitations on government
• E) Sovereignty and its absolute , limited divided or
federated character