Abstract
When the free governments of the West come under criticism today, which is always, it is usually said that they are not sufficiently free. But it is usually meant that they are not sufficiently strong. Can free government be strong? While this challenge must be faced today, it was also faced by the authors of modern free government, the political philosophers who first put liberty to the fore and made it viable in politics. It might be said that these authors faced a challenge they had put to themselves, for they succeeded in substituting the question: ‘Can free government be strong?’ for the traditional: ‘Can free government be wise?’ After they had shown that liberty, not virtue or wisdom, should be the end of government, they had to demonstrate, against the weight of opinion and experience, that free government could be strong. This they did chiefly by inventing and naming (since a new name would signify a useful invention) executive power. Executive power would be confined to executing the will of the legislature or of the people; hence it would not endanger liberty, yet it would be strong enough to protect free government and to make it work effectively.
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Notes
See Francis D. Wormuth, The Origins of Modern Constitutionalism (New York, 1949 );
W. B. Gwyn, The Meaning of the Separation of Powers ( New Orleans: Tulane University Studies in Political Science, 1965 );
M. J. C. Vile, Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers (Oxford, 1967 ).
[Charles Dallison], The Royalists Defence (London, 1648) p. 99.
Thomas Hobbes, De Cive VI, 8, p. 178 in the edition of Bernard Gert, Man and Citizen (New York, 1972).
Hobbes, Leviathan ed. W. G. Pogson Smith (Oxford, 1909) Rev. and Concl., p. 550; Locke, Two Treatises u, 137, 139.
Hobbes, A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England, ed. Joseph Cropsey ( Chicago, 1971 ). Cropsey’s introduction has been a great help to this enquiry.
Dialogue p. (21); cf. Hobbes, De Homine xIv, 9, p. 76, in the edition of Bernard Gert, Man and Citizen (New York, 1972); De Cive XII, 12, p. 253.
Hobbes, The Elements of Law ed. F. Tönnies (2nd edn., New York, 1969) p. 115.
Leviathan pp. 22, 28, 37–8; see Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., ‘Hobbes and the Science of Indirect Government,’ American Political Science Review LXV (1971) 105.
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© 1987 George Feaver and Frederick Rosen
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Mansfield, H.C. (1987). Hobbes on Liberty and Executive Power. In: Feaver, G., Rosen, F. (eds) Lives, Liberties and the Public Good. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08006-9_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08006-9_3
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