Hobbes on Sovereignty and Law

Abstract

Sir Robert Filmer found much to criticise in Hobbes’ account of how government arose. But he was far more happy with Hobbes’ treatment of the powers which rulers held once it had arisen: ‘[w]ith no small content I read Mr. Hobbes’s book De Cive, and his Leviathan, about the rights of sovereignty, which no man, that I know, hath so amply and judiciously handled. I consent with him about the rights of exercising government, but I cannot agree to his means of acquiring it’. As we have seen, Filmer was an absolutist who welcomed many of Hobbes’ doctrines on the power of sovereigns. Both men set down their thoughts on this subject before Civil War broke out in England, for Filmer had completed a version of his Patriarcha by 1632, and Hobbes finished the Elements of Law by 1640. In Leviathan, Hobbes did indeed add to his discussion a number of references to events and debates that took place in the 1640s. But the broad contours of his argument are much the same as in the Elements. The immediate historical context of Hobbes’ central teachings on the powers of sovereigns is to be sought in the disputes on the royal prerogative which took place in England before the Long Parliament met in November 1640.¹