First Principles of Law, State and Government in Hobbes’s Civil Philosophy

Abstract

The focus of concern in the present chapter lies with the first-order principles of law, state and government that Hobbes expounded as basic component elements of his civil philosophy, and with this in the form in which the civil philosophy received its definitive statement in the argument of Leviathan. The principles of law, state and government to be considered are those that relate to the following main subject-matters of which Hobbes treated: the rights and powers of sovereignty specific to government in the civil state, or commonwealth; the liberty of the subjects of commonwealths; the organization of public administration in the state as effected through the exercise of sovereign rights and powers; the general principles of the rule of law maintained in the state, and as comprehending the principles of civil law and the principles of crime and punishment. In addition, there is consideration given to the underlying principles of legal-political order that Hobbes saw as being embodied in what he identified as the fundamental laws of nature. It is the first-order principles of law, state and government that Hobbes picked out, including the fundamental principles of natural law, that serve to underline the central position which is assigned to him in the modern tradition in political thought.