Hobbes, the State of Nature and the Laws of Nature

Abstract

That philosophical doctrines speak differently to different ages is nowhere more apparent than in the intellectual fortunes of Thomas Hobbes. In the seventeenth century, he was considered a ‘hobbist’, a libertine and free thinker, so much so that even Locke, who held much in common with him, avoided any mention of his doctrines. (The seventeenth century would have also scorned the notion that he was a philosopher of order, seeing in his doctrines the roots of sedition and disorder.) By the eighteenth century, he had risen to the level of Filmer and Rousseau and was honoured as the precursor of Pufendorf. He was ‘discovered’ in his own right towards the end of the century by the English philosophical radicals, notably Bentham, who admired not so much the method or premises as the break with natural law and the robust concept of a rationally directed sovereign will. But he only really came into his own during the second half of the nineteenth century, largely because he provided the foundations, and many of the categories, for Austin’s legal positivism, and support for the theory of the untrammelled rights of Parliament. By its end, he was being read as an authority on the requisites of political institutions as they had come to be understood under Austin’s influence; that is, legal perfection and the importance of clear delegations of the sovereign authority. But it was a short-lived glory, as theories of untrammelled sovereignty came increasingly under attack.