Thomas Hobbes from Behemoth to Leviathan

Abstract

This survey of the three versions of natural law composed by Thomas Hobbes indicates the rapid and radical responses made by him in Paris to the revolutionary ideas and events in which he became involved in rapid succession. He had begun in England in 1640 with a conventional exposition of the natural laws or the moral order conceived in terms of the cardinal virtues and vices. He arrived finally at the ‘Science of natural justice’. The primary aim of this survey is to show how the term ‘natural justice’ as Hobbes invented it is a carefully defined, technical name for a carefully constructed and expounded system of jurisprudence, based on natural science of cause and effect.